Rick Cook - The Wizardry Quested

"You’re sure this wasn’t some kind of robot?" he demanded.

"It was definitely real. It’s not real tame either. It nearly knocked our guy off his stilts."

"Old Cheng was right! They do still exist. This is fantastic!"

"I think it’s genetic engineering of some sort," Keith’s informant added, but Keith was gone in transports of ecstasy. Suddenly life had meaning again!

"We’ve had reports from remote areas of China."

"Yeah, well:"

"There’s even a rumor that a top-secret Air Force project in Alaska got a picture of a dragon in the air a few years ago. But to find one, and here of all places. It’s just unbelievable."

By this time Page and Toland had figured out the subject of the conversation and they exchanged looks. "Unbelievable" was the word they would have chosen all right, but obviously their boss did believe it. They had been sounding out major investors about replacing Malinowski for a couple of months because of his diminishing interest in the business and growing weird-ness. If they handled this right it could be the capper for their campaign. Meanwhile, he was still the boss and they had to act like this was important.

"Anyway," the voice on the phone went on, "I checked and found out more. The authorities have known about it for a couple of days and they’re keeping it quiet. Meanwhile, the police are hunting for it."

"The police?"

"Yeah. They want to kill it because it’s dangerous."

Malinowski unfolded off the couch as if it had exploded under him.

"We can’t let them do that! Angel, get our lawyers on the phone. Joe, use the phone in the other room to call Bill Reeves at Interior. We’ve got to protect this thing."

"You really think you can get the government to move on this?" Toland asked. Keith paused, phone in hand, to look at him. "They’d better, after all I did for that twit in the White House." Malinowski had been one of the high-technology business leaders the incumbent had paraded during the election to support his

"new technology vision for America" Like a lot of them, Malinowski had been sorely disappointed with the results. After the election they discovered their guy thought high technology meant anything with a lot of blinking lights and he couldn’t use his computer consistently because he kept putting floppy disks in upside down. His computer problems got significantly worse after his teenaged daughter went back to school.

"Maybe that dope will be good for something after all," Malinowski said as he reached for the phone.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, if not smoothly. By dint of a little fast talking, steadfast denial of any knowledge of anyone in the truck and a firm promise to get it off the hotel grounds immediately, Jerry was able to recover the vehicle. By waiting until the hotel corridors were packed with Comdex attendees, shielding Moira in the back of an elevator behind himself, Taj,

Bal-Simba, the Russians and Gilligan, and employing a few other expedients, they were able to get Moira out of the hotel and into the truck a few hours later. Then he and Bal-Simba made arrangements to meet Vasily’s friend with the airplane that evening and drove off with Moira safely in the back, hidden behind a stack of boxes salvaged from the dumpsters.

Jerry was getting a headache.

They were sitting in a lounge off the casino at the hotel. Perhaps a hundred tables were packed into a space big enough for fifty. Each table would have been small for two normal people and, while Mick was a little on the short side, Jerry definitely was not and Bal-Simba was huge. As a result things were decidedly crowded. The Russians were sitting at the table just over Jerrys shoulder, and when he leaned back he bumped heads with Kuznetsov. Moira was waiting in the rented truck.

It was early evening and the other tables were mostly occupied. Occasionally a burst of laughter or a snatch of conversation would rise over the level of the general racket, but mostly it was just noise with a country-western beat. The band may not have been good, but they fulfilled one of the primary requirements for any lounge act by being loud, almost loud enough to drown out the unrelenting cacophony from the slot machines on the other side of the railing.

"My head hurts," he muttered.

"Best place for a private meeting," Kuznetsov told him. "Noise drives listeners crazy and even digital signal processors have trouble picking out one conversation."

"How do you know that?"

The Russian just smiled. "Heads up everyone. Here comes our contact." Jerry turned in his seat and saw a man pushing his way through the crowd. Save for bushy white eyebrows and an enormous white mustache there wasn’t a hair on his head. He looked like a walrus, if you can imagine a sunburned walrus wearing aviator sunglasses and an orange flight suit decorated with a wildly improbable collection of patches. Jerry saw insignia from everything from the 23rd Fighter Squadron to something called Miz Lai’s Cottontail Ranch and Sporting Club. He looked over at Gilligan.

"I don’t know and I don’t want to know," Gilligan muttered.

The man nodded to the Russians and pulled a chair over to the table where the others sat. "Charlie Conroy,’" he boomed, extending a paw that was sunburned as pink as the rest of him. "My friends call me Cowboy."

As Jerry shook the preferred hand he saw the wrist was decorated with a watch the size of a can of snuff, with dials and buttons and hands galore. Almost as soon as Charlie sat down a waitress wearing not much, and that black and slinky, slithered up to take his order.

"Honey," he boomed, "bring me over one of those Tanqueray and tonics. Make it a double." The waitress reflexively avoided a pat on the rump and swivel-hipped off through the tables.

He turned to the Russians. "Vaseline you old commie, how’s it hanging?"

"Okay, sky pirate. Burned any babies lately?"

"Naw, I got out of that end of tie business. How about you, Ivan? Still doing them dirty deeds?"

"I get by," Kuznetsov said with a slight smile. Jerry got the impression he wasn’t nearly as charmed by Conroy’s antics as his partner. Gilligan was obviously un-charmed, but he was keeping his mouth shut.

"Hell of a crowd, ain’t it?" Cowboy boomed to Jerry and Bal-Simba. "Between the tourists and the computer geeks, whole damn town is packed. I ain’t seen anything like it since the fall of Saigon."

The waitress returned with Charlie’s drink and Jerry paid for it. Charlie emptied the gin and tonic in one gulp and held up the glass. Fill’er again will you, darlin’? " Obviously he had never heard of the " twenty-four hours from bottle to throttle" rule either.

"Now," he said, setting the glass on the tiny table, "I understand you boys want to make a little excursion."

"Yeah," Jerry said, glancing around the table. "Four of us and, ah, some cargo. About five hundred pounds of it. We need to make one trip to a place about a hundred and fifty miles from here."

"No problem," Charlie said. "But there are some conditions." He leaned forward and put his meaty forearms on the tiny table. Gilligan grabbed his drink just as it was shoved off the edge.

Their guest was oblivious. "Now understand, I don’t smuggle dope. Leastways not for strangers. And I won’t stand for murder on my airplane. Beyond that-" he shrugged. "I don’t see nothing and I don’t hear nothing."

That, Jerry reflected, was probably going to be the most important