The Human Blend - Alan Dean Foster [44]
“Then,” Whispr ventured hesitantly, “you can see someone paying for it even if it can’t be opened or decrypted?”
Gator turned back to his hopeful guest. “I can see more than that.” He gestured at the workbench where the gray box and its companion devices were still struggling furiously to try to decipher the thread’s contents. “For one thing I can see that the time has come for us to work out an arrangement.” As he continued speaking every word echoed as if freighted with its own punctuation. “I have excellent commercial contacts. This is potentially big, my slender friend. Very big.” His gaze drifted ceilingward and elsewhere. “It is,” he paused for emphasis, “unsurpassingly large.”
It was at that point and on the cusp of incipient mutual celebration that the alarms went off.
Articulating an expletive that was more consciously reptilian than anything he had uttered thus far, Gator rushed to a battery of small projectors installed at the far end of the techrap. The images they displayed of hustling, disembarking armored squads were intimidating. As they were meant to be. The arriving cops were not trying to mask their presence. Spreading out from multiple transports they were approaching the complex rapidly and on foot. A pair of heavily armed police watercraft idled at a distance from the building in order to cut off any retreat via the river. Auto minihunters had perched themselves in the surrounding trees. All of this disheartening visual information arrived in the techrap courtesy of automated security pickups hidden among the dense vegetation and mounted on the backs of Gator’s modified free-roaming pets. They were well and truly trapped, a despondent Whispr decided.
Except they were not.
“Follow me.” Hissing a single code word his host shut down the security pickups and turned away. Devoid of options or ideas, Whispr complied. If Gator thought that in the panic and confusion his guest might forget a certain small sliver of specious metal, he was mistaken. Whispr followed, but not before flipping up the transparent cover of the analyzer and recovering possession of the study capsule that now contained the thread. Hurrying to keep up with his host he alternately ran and hopped as he placed the capsule back in the secret security compartment in the sole of his right shoe.
If nothing else the arrival in numbers of the authorities at Gator’s establishment confirmed that the thread had to be the object of their attention. Such extensive forces would never be deployed by the city or the state just to pick up a single questionable homicide suspect. Multiple squads of heavily armed police would not have been sent out to arrest someone like himself on suspicion of participating in an ordinary murder. Their appearance only lent reinforcement to Gator’s preliminary assessment of the thread’s value.
If only, Whispr told himself as he followed his host down through a flawlessly camouflaged trapdoor in the workroom floor, he had some idea of what was on the damned strand of metal. As far as its ostensibly unique composition was concerned that was of less interest to him than it evidently was to his host. Whispr really could not have cared if the thread had been fashioned from arc-welded fairy wings.
Had his admittedly limited scientific knowledge extended farther into the realms of physics and metallurgy he might have realized that fairy wings were more likely constituents than the reality.
Since Gator’s house and techrap complex were built on pylons out over the water Whispr was not surprised to encounter a slice of river in the compound