Reetal said, “We’ll shift our operating headquarters back to my registered suite then. The ComWebs are turned off in these vacant sections. I’ll stay in the other suite in case you find a chance to signal in.”
Heraga left a few minutes later to make his arrangements. Reetal smiled at Quillan, a little dubiously.
“Good luck, guy,” she said. “Anything else to settle before you start off?”
Quillan nodded. “Couple of details. If you’re going to be in your regular suite, and Fluel finds himself with some idle time on hand, he might show up for the dalliance you mentioned.”
Reetal’s smile changed slightly. Her left hand fluffed the hair at the back of her head, flicked down again. There was a tiny click, and Quillan looked at a small jeweled hair-clasp in her palm, its needle beak pointing at him.
“It hasn’t got much range,” Reetal said, “but within ten feet it will scramble the Duke’s brains just as thoroughly as they need to be scrambled.”
“Good enough,” Quillan said. “Just don’t give that boy the ghost of a chance, doll. He has a rep for playing very un-nice games with the ladies.”
“I know his reputation.” Reetal replaced the tiny gun in her hair. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Let’s look in on the Kinmarten girl for a moment. If she’s awake, she may have remembered something or other by now that she didn’t think to tell you.”
They found Solvey Kinmarten awake, and tearfully glad to see Reetal. Quillan was introduced as a member of the legal profession who would do what he could for Solvey and her husband. Solvey frowned prettily, trying very hard to remember anything that might be of use. But it appeared that she had told Reetal all she knew.
2
The blue and white Phalagon House diner, driven by Heraga, was admitted without comment into the Executive Block. It floated on unchallenged through the big entry hall and into a corridor. Immediately behind the first turn of the corridor, the diner paused a few seconds. Its side door opened and closed. The diner moved on.
Quillan, coatless and with the well-worn butt of a big Miam Devil Special protruding from the holster on his right hip, came briskly back along the corridor. Between fifteen and twenty men, their guns also conspicuously in evidence, were scattered about the entrance hall, expressions and attitudes indicating a curious mixture of boredom and uneasy tension. The eyes of about half of them swiveled around to Quillan when he came into the hall; then, with one exception, they looked indifferently away again.
The exception, leaning against the wall near the three open portals to the upper levels, continued to stare as Quillan came toward him, forehead creased in a deep scowl as if he were painfully ransacking his mind for something. Quillan stopped in front of him.
“Chum,” he asked, “any idea where Movaine is at the moment? They just give me this message for him—”
Still scowling, the other scratched his chin and blinked. “Uh . . . dunno for sure,” he said after a moment. “He oughta be in the third level conference room with the rest of ’em. Uh . . . dunno you oughta barge in there right now, pal! The commodore’s reee-lly hot about somethin’!”
Quillan looked worried. “Gotta chance it, I guess! Message is pretty important, they say—” He turned, went through the center portal of the three, abruptly found himself walking along a wide, well-lit hall.
Nobody in sight here, or in the first intersecting passage he came to. When he reached the next passage he heard voices on the right, turned toward them, went by a string of closed doors on both sides until, forty feet on, the passage angled again and opened into a long, high-ceilinged room. The voices came through an open door on the right side of the room. Standing against the wall beside the door were two men whose heads turned sharply toward Quillan as he appeared in the passage. The short, chunky one scowled. The big man next to him, the top of whose head had been permanently seared clear of hair years before by a near miss from a blaster, dropped his jaw slowly. His eyes popped.
“My God!” he said.
“Movaine in there, Baldy?” Quillan inquired, coming up.
“Movaine! He . . . you . . . how—”
The chunky man took out his gun, waved it negligently at Quillan. “Tell the ape to blow, Perk. He isn’t wanted here.”
“Ape?” Quillan asked softly. His right hand moved, had the gun by the barrel, twisted, reversed the gun, jammed it back with some violence into the chunky man’s stomach. “Ape?” he repeated. The chunky man went white.
“Bad News—” Baldy Perk breathed. “Take it easy! That’s Orca. He’s the commodore’s torpedo. How—”
“Where’s Movaine?”
“Movaine . . . he . . . uh—”
“All right, he’s not here. And Lancion can’t have arrived yet. Is Cooms in there?”
“Yeah,” Baldy Perk said weakly. “Cooms is in there, Quillan.”
“Let’s go in.” Quillan withdrew the gun, slid it into a pocket, smiled down at Orca. “Get it back from your boss, slob. Be seeing you!”
Orca’s voice was a husky whisper.
“You will, friend! You will!”
* * *
The conference room was big and sparsely furnished. Four men sat at the long table in its center. Quillan knew two of them—Marras Cooms, second in command of the Beldon Brotherhood’s detachment here, and the Duke of Fluel, Movaine’s personal gun. Going by Heraga’s descriptions, the big, florid-faced man with white hair and flowing white mustaches who was doing the talking was Velladon, the commodore; while the fourth man, younger, wiry, with thinning black hair plastered back across his skull, would be Ryter, chief of the Star’s security force.
“What I object to primarily is that the attempt was made without obtaining my consent, and secretly,” Velladon was saying, with a toothy grin but in a voice that shook with open fury. “And now it’s been made and bungled, you have a damn nerve asking for our help. The problem is yours—and you better take care of it fast! I can’t spare Ryter. If—”
“Cooms,” Baldy Perk broke in desperately from the door, “Bad News Quillan’s here an’—”
The heads of the four men at the table came around simultaneously. The eyes of two of them widened for an instant. Then Marras Cooms began laughing softly.
“Now everything’s happened!” he said.
“Cooms,” the commodore said testily, “I prefer not to be interrupted. Now—”
“Can’t be helped, commodore,” Quillan said, moving forward, Perk shuffling along unhappily beside him. “I’ve got news for Movaine, and the news can’t wait.”
“Movaine?” the commodore repeated, blue eyes bulging at Quillan. “Movaine! Cooms, who is this man?”
“You’re looking at Bad News Quillan,” Cooms said. “A hijacking specialist, with somewhat numerous sidelines. But the point right now is that he isn’t a member of the Brotherhood.”
“What!” Velladon’s big fist smashed down on the table. “Now what kind of a game . . . how did he get in here?”
“Well,” Quillan said mildly, “I oozed in through the north wall about a minute ago. I—”
He checked, conscious of having created some kind of sensation. The four men at the table were staring up at him without moving. Baldy Perk appeared to be holding his breath. Then the commodore coughed, cleared his throat, drummed his fingers on the table.
He said reflectively: “He could have news—good or bad—at that! For all of us.” He chewed on one of his mustache tips, grinned suddenly up at Quillan. “Well, sit down, friend! Let’s talk. You can’t talk to Movaine, you see. Movaine’s, um, had an accident. Passed away suddenly half an hour ago.”
“Sorry to hear it,” Quillan said. “That’s the sort of thing that happens so often in the Brotherhood.” He swung a chair around, sat down facing the table. “You’re looking well tonight, Fluel,” he observed.
The Duke of Fluel, lean and dapper in silver jacket and tight-fitting silver trousers, gave him a wintry smile, said nothing.
* * *
“Now, then, friend,” Velladon inquired confidentially, “just what was your business with Movaine?”
“Well, it will come to around twenty per cent of the take,” Quillan informed him. “We won’t argue about a half-million CR more or less. But around twenty per.”
The faces turned thoughtful. After some seconds, the commodore asked, “And who’s we?”
“A number of citizens,” Quillan said, “who have been rather unhappy since discovering that you, too, are interested in Lady Pendrake and her pals. We’d gone to considerable expense and trouble to . . . well, her ladyship was scheduled to show up in Mezmiali, you know. And now she isn’t going to show up there. All right, that’s business. Twenty per—no hard feelings. Otherwise, it won’t do you a bit of good to blow up the Star and the liner. There’d still be loose talk—maybe other complications, too. You know how it goes. You wouldn’t be happy, and neither would Yaco. Right?”