Yvette paused for a moment to regain her breath. As she got to her knees, she listened attentively for any sounds to indicate that more attackers were in the neighborhood. Only stillness reached her ears; even the normal night sounds had been hushed as the forest animals fled the scene of the fight.
Then her brother’s voice came whispering its way through the darkness across the road. ‘Eve?’ he asked tentatively. ‘Five here.’
‘Same here,’ she replied, springing lightly to her feet. ‘All smooth. Is there any clear space by you?’
‘Yes- lug them over this way.’
Yvette picked up two of her would-be kidnapers and hauled them to the other side of the pathway, where her brother was waiting with his victims. Jules helped carry the other three while she retrieved her tiara. In just a couple of minutes the ten unconscious or dead crooks – Jules was afraid that number eight stunner setting might have been a little too strong – were laid out on their backs in a neat row.
Yvette took a miniflash out of her boot and shone it on the faces of the two people who’d meant to impersonate them. ‘Ugh, do we look like that? No wonder everybody stares at us. I don’t think I’ll ever trust a mirror again.’
‘They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ her brother pointed out.
‘’They’ say a lot of things that wouldn’t buy you a cupful of air on market day. We’d better get down to work. ”Au juste.’
Jules handed her his stun-gun, on which he had turned the setting back down to three. ‘If you want to start working on these creeps, I’ll go back and see if I can navigate the car along the path. Damn, I wish we’d been able to use our own it would have been a lot easier to fly in here.’
‘But out of character,’ Yvette reminded him. ‘The Velasquezes had to rent the biggest, flashiest limousine available. Consistency above all.’
Muttering something under his breath about what idiots the Velasquezes were, Jules set off back along their path to where they had parked their car. Some ten minutes later the car came crawling back along the route, moving with agonizing slowness as Jules navigated its way down the narrow path trying to avoid scraping the sides on the trees and rocks. By the time he pulled up, Yvette had just finished injecting their prisoners with nitrobarb from the small kit inside her boot. ‘They’ll be ready for questioning in twenty minutes.’ she said.
She helped her brother load their captives like cordwood into the back of the limousine, then guided him as he backed up the path to the highway. Once out on the open road, however, the d’Alemberts did not drive back to their hotel. Carting ten unconscious bodies through the lobby would have required a bit of explanation, even from such colorful and eccentric characters as Carlos and Carmen Velasquez.
Instead, Jules gunned their limousine on the road out of town. They had taken the opportunity soon after they arrived on Algonia to rent a country ‘house’- which most people would have considered a large estate – by phone from a broker. This house was so far removed from everything that they could have operated an illicit spacefield on the estate without the neighbors being any the wiser.
They unloaded their freight into the empty living room of the mansion and got down to serious business.
The man Jules had shot with the number eight stunner beam was useless for their purposes, but the other nine hoodlums were just coming out of the initial coma state induced by the nitrobarb and were ready to talk. Under sharp questioning by the two expert agents – and completely unable to lie or withhold knowledge under the nitrobarb’s influence- they revealed the complete details of their plan: how they had intended to waylay and kill the Velasquezes, substitute their own people for them, then have those substitutes check out of the hotel, taking all their money with them. The operation would have been perfect, had Carlos and Carmen been the people they’d seemed- but, unfortunately for these crooks, the d’Alemberts were not a pair of fops.
Yvette and Jules intensified their interrogation. It took no great effort to learn the name of these people’s immediate superior, a supposedly respectable stockbroker in a city over a thousand kilometers away. But they were after more information – the name of the biggest crime chief on the entire planet.
After peeling layer after layer of hierarchy, the SOTE agents got the information they were looking for, but it startled them nonetheless. The crime boss on this world was no less than the baron of the city of Osberg, which was the second largest city on Algonia.
CHAPTER NINE – STORMING THE CASTLE
Along with the proliferation of titles came the elaborate system of court etiquette and rules that are the hallmark of upper classes. Rules of succession were most important. Empress Stanley Three, in an attempt to avoid as many struggles as possible, decreed that strict primogeniture be observed in all inheritances – and, being a woman herself, insisted that the primogeniture be carried out with no distinction as to sex. The heir to a title was, by courtesy, addressed by the next lowest title – the oldest child of an earl, for instance, would be a count or countess until inheriting the full title. Younger children of noble families bore the honorific titles of ‘Lord’ or ‘Lady’, without anything more specific, and were treated with deference. Marriage laws, too, were more relaxed than under previous oligarchical systems. Nobles could marry either commoners or nobles of higher or lower rank, and the lower-born of the pair would automatically be raised to the rank of the spouse.
(Stanhope, Elements of Empire, Reel 2, slot 409.)
Leaving their involuntary guests trussed up and helpless in their country mansion, the d’Alemberts proceeded to drive to Osberg and, in particular, to Kraftig Castle, some two hundred and fifty kilometers away. As he drove, Jules could not help but shake his head when he thought of what they’d learned. ‘I knew our friends, whoever they are, wouldn’t stay out of a caper with this kind of money involved. But a noble getting in on the act! Who would have thought the boss would be the Baron of Osberg?’
‘You for one, brother dear,’ supplied Yvette. ‘And maybe me for another. At least we knew the boss traitor had to be somebody in a position of power. And we’d better get used to the thought of picking on the nobility; I’ll bet whoever is masterminding this conspiracy has a pretty high listing in the Peerage. Banion, when we find him, will either be posing as a noble or else have the protection and patronage of one. Either way we’ll have to go slow.’
The Baron’s castle was three kilometers outside the city of Osberg itself. Jules parked their car a good kilometer down the road and they walked in from there. Each carried a stunner taken from their ambushers and, in addition, Yvette carried her hypo kit containing enough nitrobarb to question a regiment.
They approached the stronghold cautiously, taking great care not to be seen or heard. Two phantoms in the night, they made their way to the outside of the castle walls. Kraftig Castle was an imposing edifice, four stories high and set on a steep slope. Its five hectares of ground were encircled by a reinforced concrete wall four and a half meters high that was surmounted by interlaced strands of charged barbed wire.
Jules and Yvette walked partway around the wall, sizing it up. There were two gates, front and rear, each built of five-centimeter-square bar steel and topped with more of the charged barbed wire. Neither could be opened except by electronic commands from inside the castle.
‘And not even a welcome mat,’ Yvette whispered to her brother.
‘I definitely get the impression that the good Baron doesn’t care for uninvited guests. Eh bien, if there’s no welcome mat we’ll have to provide our own. Over the top?’
‘Over the top,’ Yvette agreed.
The two grinned at each other and separated. Taking advantage of the high hedges lining the road to the back gate, they backed off some twenty meters down the path while keeping under cover. Yvette was on the left side of the roadway, Jules on the right. They could not see each other well in the darkness, but they were so used to working with one another that their reflexes worked practically in tandem. At an almost inaudible ‘now’ from Yvette, both ran at top speed toward the wall. Two sets of legs like coiled springs bent under them as they came within two meters; then the muscles pushed off and the pair of aerialists were soaring upward into the air. Each cleared the topmost wire with a full meter to spare. They had their stunners already drawn and, at the apex of their silent flight, they sent their beams – which were set on six for a twelve-hour stun – shooting down at the guards manning the wall. Firing rapidly and precisely, they shot down every guard they saw – and the fact that the interior of the courtyard was well lit helped their aim no end.