Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

He went back over to the bench and sank back down onto it. Most likely simple diversion. They might have put the gorilla up to it somehow, but he doubted it. Easier to just wait until his attention was fully somewhere else and then move. If it hadn’t been the gorilla, it would have been something or, eventually, somebody.

After a half hour he was convinced that it wasn’t any trick of the girls that had caused it, either. They would have come back and lorded it over him by now.

He felt kind of empty, almost, and it surprised him. As much as he wanted to be rid of them, they’d been the closest thing to family he’d had in fifty years.

Slowly, suddenly feeling the weight of his years, he walked back up to the nearest entrance to the park and looked for a taxi, settling instead for the maglev about two blocks farther down. It was cheaper, and he wasn’t in any hurry any more.

When he got back to the room he half expected them to be there, but when the door opened, it revealed a suite so immaculate it seemed as if nobody had ever stayed in it. Everything had been made up, and it seemed sterile, empty. It was another minute or so before he realized that the packages the three had brought in last night were also nowhere to be seen, nor was the mess in cosmetics, bath oils, and the like they’d littered the bathroom with even that morning.

He looked over and saw that the holographic plate was pulsing, indicating that there was some sort of message for him. He went over, sat down, and said, “Communications, replay message for Murphy, Patrick.”

“Message is nonverbal,” the comm reported.

“Really? Well, put it up on the screen.”

It was from his local bank. It showed a massive infusion of real cash into that account. Convertible cash, useful for transfer as well as just sitting there.

More than enough for passage first class almost anywhere he wanted to go, for buying another junker of a freighter, plus sufficient funds for several weeks of one damned huge and wondrous bender.

It was more than enough, and it wasn’t nearly anything he particularly wanted right now. It was more than a credit statement, it was a message from the Order of Saint Phineas and those behind it.

Payment due on acceptance of the delivery of the ordered merchandise.

Damn their dark souls!

The street might have been out of some idealized old history film or photo save for some of the exotic trees and flowers that could be seen both in front of the stately line of cleaner-than-nature brick brownstones and in the small flower boxes set outside oversized upper-floor windows. The places were larger than they looked at first glance, but still might have been dismissed as middle-class housing but for the gilding around the windows, doors, and immaculate edgework, and the fact that few middle-class townhouses sported upper-story gargoyles and such intricate wrought-iron works placed almost purely for decoration. More Embassy Row than Accountant’s Row, although there was no sign of any more formal function on any of the houses than as homes. The exception was a single city block stuck almost incongruously in the middle of the double rows of brownstones, a block that contained not houses but something more like a compound.

High wrought-iron gates, or gates of some material that seemed like it, blocked vehicle-sized entrances at both ends of the block, and between was a long and quite tall brick wall of the same complexion as the facing houses. Looking in through either gate’s lattice work revealed a semicircular driveway around a formal garden leading to a single large brick structure two stories high but fully a third of the block in area. It might have been an old-style mansion house or the headquarters of the local historical society.

Murphy thought it looked like a funeral home.

In the dwindling light of dusk it appeared as a remote chunk of near pitch darkness, out of place here or most anywhere in spite of the attempts to blend in using the brick and iron facade. It barely looked inhabited, but the light from two upper-floor windows was bleeding through drawn curtains, and the indirect lighting illuminated the walkway up to the rather imposing pale yellow front door. He had no doubt, though, that there were cameras galore embedded in or perhaps peering over that wall, and all sorts of security monitors covering every square millimeter of the grounds. The mere fact that it wasn’t already victim to hordes of robbers attested to that.

Murphy really didn’t know why he was there, not exactly. Concern for the girls, certainly, even though they might well be far from the city by now and nowhere near this mausoleum, and possibly curiosity as well. These people had used him many times; now he thought it was about time to stop just counting the money and taking the rest for granted.

Most of all, he didn’t like the way things had been handled. After all this time, he deserved a bit more than going down to the local monkey house and having his charges snatched right in front of him. There was simply no call to do it, particularly since they knew he knew who the client was and even where in the city they dwelled.

If they were aware of him at all at this point, then they certainly would recognize him. He didn’t mind that so much, except that they might think he was double-crossing them and now represented some sort of threat. There was always that angle, he reflected. To them, he was a shady agent employed on a need-to-know basis and not needing to know very much, working strictly for money. They had always dealt with him at arm’s length, by electronic messenger and security level calls, never in person, and that alone said to him that they had a very low opinion of his character.

He took a flask from his back pocket and drank a slug, letting it burn as it went down. How dare they impugn his honor and his motives! Never in his entire life had he ever betrayed his word, nor failed to protect the interest of his paying clients.

He reached the end of the long block, turned, and began walking down the side street along the now unbroken wall. Definitely sensors all along it. He didn’t dare bring any really good surveillance tools with him, since he assumed that strangers on foot would be observed, but he did have a few things in his clothing that could give him silent readings. The electrical fields were quite clear. The wall was literally riddled with top-of-the line security monitoring systems, that was for sure. Anybody trying to climb over that wall would be known in nothing flat. Anyone using any kind of cloaking to prevent that monitoring would still fail, since the continuous energy field their stuff set up would create a moving silhouette of any intruder that would be just as obvious as someone tripping the alarms. Even the best cloaking would reveal sufficient distortion to draw much attention to the one who was cloaked.

One thing was certain: the Order of Saint Phineas had money to burn and used it to buy only the best.

Hell, they’d used it to hire him, hadn’t they?

There were two small service entrances in the back wall off an urban alley, but neither afforded any view at all of the inside, not even what could be seen through the front gates. The big house was set back, so it was much closer to the alley than the main street, but there was still a fair amount of space to cover if you went in here, and those sensors were everywhere and quite directional.

So, okay, Murphy. You’re an old fart way past your prime who gets winded going downhill. How the hell would the likes of you get into a place the likes of this one?

He didn’t have an answer for that. In fact, the only answers for the really tough ones were twofold: local, preferably inside information, which he didn’t have, and whatever money it took to finance what was needed to pull it off once you had that information.