Flatlander - Larry Niven [38]
“What made you think it was Anubis?”
“It was Anubis territory. The Chambers kidnap was only the last of half a dozen in that area. Smooth operations, no excitement, no hitches, victims returned intact after the ransom was paid.” He glared. “No, I’m not proud of Anubis. It’s just that he tended not to make mistakes, and he was used to making people disappear.”
“Uh huh.”
“They made themselves disappear, the whole gang, around the time of that last kidnap. We assume they were building up a stake.”
“How much did they get?”
“On the Chambers kids? A hundred thousand.”
“They’d have made ten times that selling them as transplants. They must have been hard up.”
“You know it. Nobody was buying. What does all this have to do with your being shot at?”
“A wild idea. Could Anubis be interested in the Chambers kids again?”
Bera gave me a funny look. “No way. What for? They bled them white the first time. A hundred thousand UN marks isn’t play money.”
After Bera left, I sat there not believing it.
Anubis had vanished. Loren had acted immediately to take over Anubis’s territory. Where had they gone, Anubis and the others? Into Loren’s organ banks?
But there was Tiller/Lincoln.
I didn’t like the idea that any random ex-organlegger might decide to kill me the instant he saw me. Finally I did something about it. I asked the computer for data on the Chambers kidnapping.
There wasn’t much Bera hadn’t told me. I wondered, though, why he hadn’t mentioned Charlotte’s condition.
When ARM police had found the Chambers kids drugged on a hotel parking roof, they had both been in good physical condition. Holden had been a little scared, a little relieved, just beginning to get angry. But Charlotte had been in catatonic withdrawal. At last notice she was still in catatonic withdrawal. She had never spoken with coherence about the kidnapping or about anything else.
Something had been done to her. Something terrible. Maybe Bera had taught himself not to think about it.
Otherwise the kidnappers had behaved almost with rectitude. The ransom had been paid; the victims had been returned. They had been on that roof, drugged, for less than twenty minutes. They showed no bruises, no signs of maltreatment … another sign that their kidnappers were organleggers. Organleggers aren’t sadists. They don’t have that much respect for the stuff.
I noted that the ransom had been paid by an attorney. The Chambers kids were orphans. If they’d both been killed, the executor of their estate would have been out of a job. From that viewpoint it made sense to capture them both … but not all that much sense.
And there couldn’t be a motive for kidnapping them again. They didn’t have the money. Except—
It hit me joltingly. The second Freezer Bill.
Holden Chambers’s number was in the basement computer. I was dialing it when second thoughts interrupted. Instead I called downstairs and set a team to locating possible bugs in Chambers’s home or phone. They weren’t to interfere with the bugs or alert possible listeners. Routine stuff.
Once before the Chambers kids had disappeared. If we weren’t lucky, they might disappear again. Sometimes the ARM business was like digging a pit in quicksand. If you dug hard enough, you could maintain a noticeable depression, but as soon as you stopped …
The Freezer Law of 2122 had given the ARM a field day. Some of the gangs had simply retired. Some had tried to keep going and wound up selling an operation to an ARM plant. Some had tried to reach other markets, but there weren’t any, not even for Loren, who had tried to expand into the asteroid belt and found that they wouldn’t have him, either.
And some had tried kidnapping, but inexperience kept tripping them up. The name of a victim points straight at a kidnapper’s only possible market. Too often the ARMs had been waiting.
We’d cleaned them out. Organlegging should have been an extinct profession this past year. The vanished jackals I spent my days hunting should have posed no present threat to society.