Death Match - Diane Duane [9]
“I’ll get you your cane, O superannuated one.”
Catie smiled a crooked smile and went out, rubbing her neck, then caught herself massaging the sports injury she didn’t have, and smiled more crookedly still as she went down the hall to the bathroom.
Somewhere else entirely a meeting was taking place in a bar. It was a virtual bar, and the drink was virtual, and the customers were all wearing seemings, which well suited their purpose, in most cases, since most of them were intent on keeping their business to themselves.
Under a ceiling of blue glass, a tall, blunt-featured man with hair cut very, very short was sitting at one of the tables nearest the big central fountain, a bowl of tan, blue-veined marble. The man was dressed in an ultrablack single-all of extremely conservative cut, with a white silk jabot at the throat, and he was turning a martini glass around and around on the matte white marble of the tabletop. His face was very still, giving no indication of the turmoil of thought presently going on inside it. His mouth twitched once or twice, an expression that could have been taken for a smile, but that impression would have been very incorrect.
Outside the bar it was afternoon, or pretending to be. The light lay long and low and golden over the pedestrianized street outside, as people strolled up and down it with shopping bags and small children in tow. Something came between the afternoon light pouring through the windows and the man sitting by the fountain, blocking away the golden glint of the afternoon light on the martini glass. The man in the ultrablack single-all looked up and squinted slightly at the second man standing there.
The newcomer sat down casually enough in the other chair. The first man looked at him for a few moments. The second man was small, broad-shouldered but thick around the waist, and dressed in slikjeans and a dark blazer with a white T-shirt underneath, a look that suggested the wearer was caught among several different eras and trying to fulfil fashion imperatives from all of them. Scattered, thought the first man. Don’t know why I’m bothering—
“Thanks for coming, Darjan,” said the second man, and looked the first one casually in the face, then glanced away again.
“Don’t thank me, Heming,” said Darjan. “We have a problem.”
“Yeah, I heard the results,” Heming said.
“A big problem,” said Darjan. “We started hearing from the syndicate’s backers within about ten minutes of the win.”
“They’re just nervous, I can understand wh—”
“You can’t understand what they understand,” Darjan said, “which is that the pools projections never indicated anything like this happening, and a lot of people are going to be out a lot of money unless something’s done.”
“It’s luck,” said Heming, shrugging. “The kind of thing you can’t predict.”
Darjan laughed harshly. “With the computers you people have, with probability experts who can even get the weather right, nowadays, five days out of six, you’re telling me this kind of ‘luck’ couldn’t be predicted? You people were so sure that your prognostication algorithms were foolproof. Well, we’re about to be the fools. And the booby prize has more zeroes after it than you’re ever going to want to see. Something has to be done!”
“Look,” said Heming, starting to look alarmed for the first time, “it really is just a run of luck. It can’t last. If they—”
“You’re damned right it isn’t going to last,” said Darjan, going suddenly grim. “Accidents are going to start happening. Their luck’s run out.”
Heming looked more nervous still. “Listen,” he said. “There are ways…You wouldn’t want to ruin everything by getting too…you know…overt. If someone should suspect—”
“Suspicion we can live with,” said Darjan, pushing the martini glass away from him in disgust. “Losing one point five billion dollars or so, that we can’t live with for a second…and no one else is going to be allowed to live with it, either.”
“One point five…”
“That was the last estimate.” Darjan looked up from under those thick dark brows at Heming. “What