Wild Country

Chapter Seventeen

Marianne was fleeing up North Broadway before the syndicate had time to react. Within twenty minutes, she reached the sprawling shuttleport outside Kansas Ringcity; in another five minutes she parked her Ocelot in an expensive sealed compartment deep inside the fifth underground level of the shuttleport parking complex. A shuttle-setter herself, Marianne knew that such parking compartments were available for storing an automobile while you spent a month on New Israel/Aleph, if you could afford the tab.

A tracer bug will not transmit through five layers of ferroconcrete, so the syndicate only knew that she had gone to ground north of the Ringcity beltline. Marianne was smart and lucky. Smart to hurry aboard the first monorail to St. Joseph; lucky to find a suburban mall immediately in old Saint Joe.

By the time Marianne had outfitted herself in cotton work clothes, the syndicate had called off their womanhunt. They knew Marianne Placidas lived near SanTone, and they knew what their own man had told her because they had him under narcosis. Very soon after the interrogation began, they knew that they were not going to muscle out the rival outfit.

For one thing, the rival's address was on Sharon Square in the satellite colony of New Israel/Beth. Had it been New Israel/Aleph, they might have entertained a hope that some Earth-based drug baron was taking it easy in the low-gravity spa on that carefully groomed tourist haven. They could get an ID check and, when he shuttled back Earthside. deal with him in customary ways.

But Beth was New Israel's second satellite colony, the one devoted to research. No one could visit without a special visa, except for Israelis with expertise in weapons, physics, agronomy, or some other skill vital to the survival of a spacefaring people.

The syndicate knew its limitations. It enjoyed traditions as old and honored as the island of Corsica, and no doubt it could find — or force — some accommodation with any government on Earth, at some level. But New Israel? Every year those hardnosed sabras seemed to care less about the world they had left; a world they felt had exiled them to space colonies. Oh, they still had friendly arrangements; for example, with Turkey, the site of their original spaceport. And of course, Turkey was a prime region for producing poppy heads. Who would know that better than Corsican middlemen?

Now, perhaps, the middlemen were to be thrust outside. The syndicate resolved to peel every eye, prick every ear. It would not be wise to insert a tendril into New Israel's business, for that tendril could be reeled in like a string on a bobbin. No bunch without its own seat on the World Council could afford to be pulled in by New Israel's Ha Mossad agents. Anybody without a standing force of military spacecraft was plain upazzo, crazy, to take on those guys.

But why had the Mossad converted a good syndicate soldier merely to contact Felix Sorel? Maybe because Sorel's own operations were so cagey, so condensed, so carefully interwoven with the politics of Mexico and Cuba. New Israel did not want trouble; it coveted only success — on terms that few men on Earth could appreciate. When you feel that you have been expelled, literally, from your mother planet, you are not likely to harbor tender thoughts about the people still living there.

The syndicate learned from their wigged-out soldier that New Israel had offered him a reasonable bribe: a sex-rejuvenation operation. Syndicate bosses smiled at this for two reasons. One was admiration: not many mobs could offer bribes like that. The other was savage satisfaction: the soldier would not live to enjoy it. The Placidas woman might be harder to catch.

After drawing a great lump of cash in St. Joseph, Marianne slept the night on a slow local to Des Moines, fretful at every stop. The Corsican soldier slept without further cares on the bottom of the muddy Missouri, undisturbed by the fish that nibbled at his eyes.