With Amanda.
Mandy wore virginal white, a sleeveless mandarin-collared dress with a mid-thigh skirt that clung lovingly to her curves. She’d done her hair up in the latest piled-high fashion: some stylist’s idea of neoclassical. Pancho had put on her best pantsuit, pearl gray with electric blue trim, almost the same shade of blue as Elly. Next to Amanda, though, she felt like a walking corpse.
She’d phoned Humphries several times to tell him she was bringing Amanda, and gotten the answering machine each time. It wasn’t until she’d been on her way to the catacombs that Humphries had returned her calls, angrily demanding to know who this Amanda Cunningham was and why Pancho wanted to bring her to their meeting.
It was tough holding a reasonable conversation through the wrist-phone, but Pancho finally got across the information that Amanda was going to be her co-pilot on the mission and she’d thought he might be interested in recruiting her to help Pancho’s espionage work.
In the wristphone’s tiny screen it was almost impossible to judge the expression on Humphries’s face, but his tone was clear enough.
“All right,” he said grudgingly. “Bring her along if you think she might be able to help us. No sweat.”
Pancho smiled sweetly and thanked him and clicked the phone off. No sweat, huh? she thought, laughing inwardly. He’ll change his mind once he gets a look at Mandy. He’ll sweat plenty.
Pancho spent the time on the electric stairways to Selene’s lowest level telling Mandy everything she knew about Humphries. Everything except the fact that he’d hired her to spy on Dan Randolph.
“He’s actually a billionaire?” Amanda’s big blue eyes went wider than ever when Pancho described Humphries’s underground palace.
“Humphries Biotech,” Pancho replied. “The Humphries Trust, lord knows what else. You can look him up in the financial nets.”
“And you’re dating him!”
Frowning slightly at her incredulousness, Pancho replied, “I told you, it’s strictly business. He’s… eh, he’s tryin’ to hire me away from Astro.”
“Really?” A suspicious, supercilious tone dripped from the one word.
Pancho grinned at her. “More or less.”
Once they stepped through the airlock-type door and into Humphries’s underground garden, Amanda gasped with awe. “It’s heavenly!”
“Pretty neat,” Pancho agreed.
Humphries was standing at the open door to the house, waiting for them, eying Amanda as they came up the walk.
“Martin Humphries,” Pancho said, as close to a formal introduction as she knew, “I would like you to meet—”
“Ms. Amanda Cunningham,” Humphries said, all smiles. “I looked up your dossier when I got Pancho’s message that you were joining us this evening.”
Pancho nodded, impressed. Humphries can tap into Astro’s personnel files. He must have Dan’s offices honeycombed with snoops.
Humphries took Amanda’s extended hand and bent over it, his lips barely touching her satiny white skin. Amanda looked as if she wanted to faint.
“Come in, ladies,” Humphries said, tucking Amanda’s arm under his own. “Come in and welcome.”
To Pancho’s surprise, Humphries didn’t come on to Amanda. Not obviously, at least. A human butler served aperitifs in the library-cum-bar and Humphries showed off his collection of first editions.
“Pretty rare, some of them,” he boasted mildly. “I keep them here because of the climate control system. Back home in Connecticut it would cost a considerable sum to keep the old family home at a constant temperature and humidity. Here in Selene it comes automatically.”
“Or we breathe vacuum,” Pancho commented. Amanda gave her a knowing look.
The butler showed them to the dining room, where the women sat on either side of Humphries. A pair of squat, flat-topped robots trundled back and forth from the kitchen carrying plates and glasses. Pancho watched intently as the robots’ padded claws gripped the chinaware and crystal. They didn’t drop a thing, although while clearing the salad plates one of them missed Pancho’s dish by a fraction of a millimeter and almost knocked it off the table. Before anyone could react, though, it recovered, grasped the plate firmly and tucked it into its recessed storage section.
“That’s a pretty good optical recognition system they’ve got,” Pancho said.
“I don’t believe it’s optical,” Amanda countered. To Humphries she asked, “Is it?”