Kieran promptly forgot the line his mind had been turning to. His brow furrowed. “What are you saying? That you’re giving up the chance to walk away with a third of the loot, and are prepared to take the consequences, just to straighten this out?”
Elaine nodded resolutely; but she was barely holding back tears. “It’s what’s right. . . . Deep down, I guess I never was the right material for this kind of thing.” She shrugged. “That’s all there is to it.”
Kieran turned to stare at her. A faint smile puckered his mouth as he sensed a situation of opportunity beckoning. It was exactly the kind of people that Elaine had described, whose unenlightened existence he felt it his mission to better through a little moral guidance and introduction to the virtues of munificence and austerity. “Maybe we don’t have to let you go through anything quite as bad as that, Elaine,” he said softly.
She produced a handkerchief to stifle back sniffles. “What other way is there?”
“I presume the initial transfer will be made into an account in Sarda’s name,” Kieran said. “That way, he can vanish when the time’s right, and there’ll be no trail back to you or Balmer for the banking authorities to follow.”
Elaine nodded. “You obviously know your way around these things.”
“Do you still have the graphic that was inside the chamber door?” Kieran asked. “The pattern that triggered the posthypnotic command.”
“No . . . But the image is stored. I could make a copy. Why?”
Kieran felt rising excitement at the glimmering of an idea that was forming. The original Sarda would obviously have been through the same conditioning too! “Tell me more about this meeting that Leo’s attending at the Zodiac bank,” he said. “What time is it scheduled to take place?”
18
In the lodging at the outer end of Gorky Avenue where he had been hiding since his unscheduled resuscitation, Leo Sarda checked through the collection of documents and data cartridges making up the phase-one delivery, and arranged them in his briefcase along with the downloaded papers from the bank. The room around him was cramped, cheaply furnished, and felt squalid—construction workers’ accommodations just inside one of the main locks out to the surface. He would be glad to get out of it. But he’d had to stay away from places where he might be recognized.
“Lousy five million,” he snarled as he clicked the lid of the briefcase shut. Balmer was right. He would have been insane to settle for that, while his other preening, celebrity self, along with Herbert and Max Morch, and their financial backers were getting set up to share out billions. Well, he would be putting that little item right very shortly now.
He zipped up his jacket, checked one last time over the oddments strewn on the steel-frame bed and side table that he had been using as a desk to be sure he’d forgotten nothing, and let himself out into the stairwell. Two flights down, he came to a gray-walled passage flanked by entrance doors to other units, which took him out onto the shallow-stepped walkway leading down to the concourse where the maglev line ended. As he approached the terminal, a tall, athletic-looking man in a dark business suit and tie with tan topcoat—conspicuously unusual attire for that part of town—stepped forward from where he had been standing by the entrance to the boarding platform. He was smiling cheerfully and carrying a brown document folder under one arm.
“Good morning. Dr. Sarda?”
“Who are you?” Nobody was supposed to know of Sarda’s whereabouts except Balmer and Elaine.
“Kennilworth Troon is the name, from Zodiac Commercial Bank. Henry Balmer wanted to be sure you arrived without mishap, so they sent a car. It’s waiting on the lower level.”
Sarda was suspicious. If that were so, why hadn’t they called earlier? Because they were afraid he might check? “I think not,” he said, moving around the stranger in a wide arc and quickening his pace.
“Guard!” the man commanded. A large black dog that Sarda hadn’t noticed before, sitting on its haunches a few yards farther on in his direct path, stood up and growled. Sarda halted and turned. The stranger shrugged apologetically. “Sorry and all that. But as you see, I must insist.”