Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [119]
Damon felt an impulse to laugh, but he wasn’t yet in any shape to act on it. He tried to edge sideways so that he could look out of the porthole beside his seat, but the effort proved too much. Beyond the pilot, though, he could see dark green slopes and snow-capped peaks as well as sky. He thought he recognized Cobblestone Mountain directly ahead of the copter’s course, although it was difficult to believe that they’d come so far in what had not seemed to be a long time.
“It isn’t funny,” the tall man complained, having deciphered the attempted laugh. “I guess I might have asked for it, the first time, waiting till you were in the alley before I tried to catch up and not realizing you’d gone in there to jump me—but what was all that stuff at the kid’s apartment? We told you we weren’t the police. Stupid kid could have got himself badly hurt.”
By the time this speech was finished Damon had got his head far enough up to take a peep through the porthole, but it didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. They were in the hills, heading for the Sespe Wilderness.
“What happened to Madoc?” Damon asked weakly.
“We left him laid out on the kid’s bed, with the VE pak cradled in his arms. The police will have them both by now—and don’t blame us for having to do it that way. All we wanted was to get the tape to where it was always supposed to go. We would have let Tamlin go his own way if you hadn’t practically started a war. The kid’s in hospital again, but he’ll be okay. You’ll have to talk to him about his attitude—he doesn’t have the IT for that kind of action.”
“You didn’t know I was there, did you?” Damon whispered, just to make sure. “I thought I left you in no shape to follow me.”
“Damn right. Dirty trick, kicking a guy in the head when he’s down. When I woke up I had to get new instructions. I was told to go get the tape, so that we could deliver it to Interpol, just as we intended when we left it with the burned-out body. You really are a nuisance, you know that? Thanks to you, I am having the worst day of my life. All I wanted to do was talk to you—and now you’ve really messed things up.”
“You followed me into the alley because you wanted to talk to me?”
“Sure. Once you’d got rid of Yamanaka’s bugs my employers figured it was safe to have a private word. You could have had it in town and been free and clear by dinnertime, if you hadn’t taken it into your fool head to start a shooting match in a public corridor.”
“You started a shooting match,” Damon pointed out. “Lenny only started a brawl.”
“Either way,” the tall man said in an aggrieved tone, “the cops will have dug out every bug in the walls by now and run the tapes. Your face, my face . . . and the face of my colleague here, who had no option but to pull his gun before your friend carved him up. All you had to do was let us in, but you had to wade in and we had to defend ourselves any way we could. Violence escalates—and now we’re all in Yamanaka’s file. You could have cost us our jobs.”
“How sad,” Damon muttered. “Who exactly is your employer?”
“I can’t answer that,” the tall man complained. “All I wanted was a quiet word, and now I’m up for kidnapping. They have my face. They never got my face before, but who knows what’ll happen now? I could be in real trouble.”
“Why?” Damon wanted to know. “How many kidnappings did you do before they got a picture of your face?”
His captor wasn’t about to answer that one either.
“Why didn’t your employer have his quiet word before he turned me loose last time?” Damon demanded, allowing his tone to declare that he was the one who had the serious grievance, even though he no longer felt as if he were a fleshy ants’ nest. “Why come after me again, after a mere matter of hours?”
“Something else went wrong,” the tall man muttered. “You Heliers are absolute hell to deal with, I’ll give you that.”
“What?”
The man with the bruise