Flatlander - Larry Niven [37]
“Jackson, you’re proud of Anubis.”
Bera was shocked to his core. “The hell! He’s a dirty murdering organlegger! If I’d caught him I’d be proud of Anubis—” He stopped because my desk screen was getting information.
The computer in the basement of the ARM Building gave Anthony Tiller no chance at all of being part of the Loren gang and a probability in the nineties that he had run with the Jackal God. One point was that Anubis and the rest had all dropped out of sight around the end of April 2123, when Anthony Tiller/Mortimer Lincoln changed his face and moved into High Cliffs.
“It could still have been revenge,” Bera suggested. “Loren and Anubis knew each other. We know that much. They set up the boundary between their territories at least twelve years ago, by negotiation. Loren took over Anubis’s territory when Anubis retired. And you killed Loren.”
I scoffed. “And Tiller the Killer gave up his cover to get me two years after the gang broke up?”
“Maybe it wasn’t revenge. Maybe Anubis wants to make a comeback.”
“Or maybe this Tiller just flipped. Withdrawal symptoms. He hadn’t killed anyone for almost two years, poor baby. I wish he’d picked a better time.”
“Why?”
“Taffy was with me. She’s still twitching.”
“You didn’t tell me that! She wasn’t hit, was she?”
“No, just scared.”
Bera relaxed. His hand caressed the interface where his hair faded into air, feather-lightly, in the nervous way another man might scratch his head. “I’d hate to see you two split up.”
“Oh, it’s not …” Anything like that serious, I’d have told him, but he knew better. “Yah. We didn’t get much sleep last night. It isn’t just being shot at, you know.”
“I know.”
“Taffy’s a surgeon. She thinks of transplant stocks as raw material. Tools. She’d be crippled without an organ bank. She doesn’t think of the stuff as human … or she never used to, till she met me.”
“I’ve never heard either of you talk about it.”
“We don’t, even to each other, but it’s there. Most transplants are condemned criminals, captured by heroes such as you and me. Some of the stuff is respectable citizens captured by organleggers, broken up into illicit organ banks, and eventually recaptured by said heroes. They don’t tell Taffy which is which. She works with pieces of people. I don’t think she can live with me and not live with that.”
“Getting shot at by an ex-organlegger couldn’t have helped much. We’d better see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”
“Jackson, he was just a nut.”
“He used to be with Anubis.”
“I never had anything to do with Anubis.” Which reminded me. “You did, though, didn’t you? Do you remember anything about the Holden Chambers kidnapping?”
Bera looked at me peculiarly. “Holden and Charlotte Chambers, yah. You’ve got a good memory. There’s a fair chance Anubis was involved.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There was a rash of kidnappings about that time all over the world. You know how organlegging works. The legitimate hospitals are always short of transplants. Some sick citizens are too much in a hurry to wait their turns. The gangs kidnap a healthy citizen, break him up into spare parts, throw away the brain, use the rest for illegal operations. That’s the way it was until the Freezer Law cut the market out from under them.”
“I remember.”
“Some gangs turned to kidnapping for ransom. Why not? It’s just what they were set up for. If the family couldn’t pay off, the victim could always become a donor. It made people much more likely to pay off.
“The only strange thing about the Chambers kidnap was that Holden and Charlotte Chambers both disappeared about the same time, around six at night.” Bera had been tapping at the computer controls. He looked at the screen and said, “Make that seven. March 21, 2123. But they were miles apart, Charlotte at a restaurant with a date, Holden at Washburn University attending a night class. Now, why would a kidnap gang think they needed them both?”
“Any ideas?”
“They might have thought that the Chambers trustees were more likely to pay off on both of them. We’ll never know now.