When Keene looked up from the contract he was reviewing, Ahiro was standing in front of his desk.
He didn’t know how the ninja had gotten past Marceena and into his office, and he didn’t feel comfortable asking. Something about the Japanese man frightened him, a ruthlessness that Ahiro kept carefully concealed in his day-to-day dealings in Synsound’s business world but that shadowed through nonetheless. Keene doubted if Ahiro had simply walked past Marceena’s desk, and it was a certainty she would never have let him in without at least hitting the intercom buzzer to warn him that someone was on the way; most likely, she’d never seen him enter the waiting room or slip past her.
“What do you want?” Keene’s voice was sharper than intended, enough so to make him instantly regret the tone, but if the younger man noticed, he didn’t show that either. Not for the first time, Keene noted the scar running across Ahiro’s right eye; perhaps that was what made him look so sinister. He wondered briefly if the ninja had inflicted the wound on himself to purposely change his appearance. He didn’t think it was such a farfetched possibility.
“Mr. Eddington requires an animal more suited to fighting with his alien,” Ahiro said.
One thing Keene admired in the man—in any man, actually—was the ability to get right to the point. He capped his pen, placed it carefully on the desktop, and sat back. “We’ve already provided him with a bull and a… panther, wasn’t it?” Ahiro nodded, and Keene drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk, trying to think. “What could we possibly come up with now? A lion would outweigh the panther, or maybe a polar bear. I’m told polar bears are the only animals natural to the earth that regard human beings as prey. Getting one, though… that could be a problem. If we go that far, we might as well try an Alaskan brown bear. Now there would be an adversary.”
“I have a suggestion.”
“Fine. Let’s hear it.” Now what, Keene wondered. Another trip to the Bronx Zoo? He’d squash that idea right now; the panther’s disappearance had made the zoo triple their security force, especially since the fools were convinced that the cat was still on the loose within the zoo grounds. His idea about a bear was probably the best; if getting a polar or an Alaskan brown bear proved too difficult, grizzlies were easier to obtain. They wouldn’t have to go as far north to do it.
But when Ahiro spelled out his plan, Keene had to admit it was something he’d never considered.
Five minutes later he sent Ahiro on his way and instructed Marceena to get Yoriku on the VidPhone. They hadn’t spoken about Eddington and his project since the plans had been made for the initial abduction of the egg, but Keene hadn’t been lax in his reporting duties; he had kept his superior up-to-date with twice-weekly memos transmitted with the originals of the mountainous reports from the two bioengineers working on the project. Keene didn’t know what Yoriku planned to do with all that information, but he had no doubt the man had some future strategy already mapped out. Yoriku wasn’t the only one trying to fine-tune this situation; the idea of choosing Ken Petrillo as their cultist had been conceived and implemented solely by Keene. Every time Keene thought of the jelly vial, in particular, he felt it indicated the caliber of the people with whom he had to deal. It was foolish enough that the composer so readily accepted the “coincidental” appearance of his long-lost partner, but how could Damon Eddington honestly believe that Ahiro wouldn’t see and report Eddington’s snatching up of the jelly vial that had fallen out of Petrillo’s pocket? Ahiro saw everything and carried it all back to Keene—after, no doubt, he told it all to Yoriku.
As for himself, Keene had a serious problem with accepting that the cultist had still possessed an unopened vial. For heaven’s sake, the man was a junkie; while going too long without a fix might drive a jelly addict insane, one of the most chemically interesting things about royal jelly was that its victims could take all they wanted—no one had ever died of an overdose. Since when in the history of drug-induced mankind did an addict ever exercise self-control? It was utterly ridiculous to think Ken would carry the stuff around and wait to drink it. Despite Ahiro’s claim that Ken had pocketed his ration, what Ken had received at The Church of the Queen Mother before the Japanese man had caught his attention should have gone down his throat before he’d left the building.
So many questions… and now this latest, newest phase of the operation, as proposed by Ahiro. Far more risky, it would require advance approval from Yoriku—someone on whom Keene could fall back, if necessary. There was a definite risk factor here, and if heads ended up rolling because the bunch of them were caught, Keene wasn’t about to go down alone.
When the light on the VidPhone flashed that the connection had come through, Keene swiftly brought up a handheld recorder—one of those horrible little electronic devices that Damon Eddington detested so much—and slid it in place to the left of the speaker on the VidPhone, where it couldn’t be seen by the caller. A flick of his finger before he opened the line and the cassette started turning. “Keene here,” he said in as bland a voice as possible.
“What do you want?” Yoriku’s face filled the screen, distorted by the usual static on the communication lines.
“It’s about Damon Eddington, sir,” Keene said. Something about Yoriku seemed… different. There was a downward twist to his mouth that Keene didn’t like, a hint of something nasty in his eyes. Was it directed at him? Or had it always been there? Keene was beginning to wish he hadn’t called, despite the need to cover his back. He could’ve given approval to Ahiro’s suggestion on his own, depending on how brave he was feeling. Too late now, though.
“So?”
Keene blinked. He didn’t recall Yoriku ever slipping from his ultra-polite Japanese businessman demeanor, even when he was dispensing the most unpleasant news— like sending a vice president to play travel coordinator. “So, uh—” He fought the unaccustomed stutter and won, started over in as smooth a voice as possible. “Damon Eddington needs to obtain a more suitable animal to fight the alien and make his recordings. Ahiro was just here and he suggested—”
“You’re wasting my time,“ Yoriku grated. “I’ve already talked to Ahiro about this.”
Keene literally saw the man reach forward and hit the Disconnect button on the VidPhone. A millisecond later he found himself staring with his mouth open at a blank screen; nothing looked back at him but his own stupid, dull green reflection.
“Shit,” he said crassly as he reached over and stopped the useless recorder. His ears filled with the buzzing of the dial tone and he punched the Disconnect button on his end, then sat there with his finger on it, his mind still trying to work around his surprise at Yoriku’s uncharacteristic bad manners. Beyond that were other issues—like his superior’s claim that the matter had already been discussed with Ahiro, and thus presumably approved by Yoriku. That had been what he meant… hadn’t it? If so, Ahiro must be clearing everything Keene told him to do with Yoriku before proceeding; therefore Keene’s question was a repeat, something Yoriku despised as a prime waste of time—which in turn would rationalize his rudeness on the VidPhone. But if they were miscommunicating, Keene stood to take the full blame for the hunting expedition in which the brutally efficient Ahiro was probably already immersed.
Keene stood and fingered his tie uncomfortably. Here was an element of risk he hadn’t figured into the stupid Symphony of Hate equation. He should still be safe, though; nothing that he could think of tied him to Eddington beyond that one telephone call about the egg—and he’d made that from a pay telephone in Spanish Harlem while his chauffeur had stood ready with an Electrostun pistol. In fact, Keene hadn’t spoken with Eddington since that night, nor had the musician been in his office since last year. It rankled the hell out of Keene that Ahiro didn’t respect him enough to act on his orders without having them preapproved by that bastard Yoriku, but at least Keene felt that he was reasonably isolated from the project and its potential ramifications. Had Yoriku found out about something, perhaps Keene’s failed MedTech interview? Maybe… but probably not. Still, if someone over there had talked, it would go a long way toward explaining why Yoriku had acted so bent out of shape on the VidPhone. On the other hand, Yoriku might be extremely unhappy with Eddington right how. With Synsound’s pet “arteest” on the road to addictive damnation, Yoriku would have to start cultivating another alternative musician for that small but profitable—and growing—quiet niche in Synsound’s customers that Damon Eddington didn’t realize indeed existed for his work.
Keene grinned to himself. That was a blow Yoriku wasn’t going to get over anytime soon. Rumor had it—and gossip certainly procreated well in the heart of Synsound— that Yoriku liked Eddington’s music so much that he had it piped into his penthouses and private offices. The thought made Keene shiver; how could anyone listen to that stuff if they didn’t have to? Damon Eddington’s early classical renaissance pieces had been pleasant, if not vaguely dull, but in Keene’s opinion the later compositions had deteriorated into something that sounded like banshees being tortured. Any fool who would willingly listen to that crap deserved to be laughed at.
Keene laughed all right, every time his monthly pay slip was delivered and one twelfth of his six-figure salary settled nicely into his healthy global market fund. How contemptible that he would pocket so much of Synsound’s money when less than two years ago he had longed to breathe the sterilized air of MedTech, Synsound’s fiercest corporate rival. Now he hated both companies: Synsound for trapping him in a position undermined by the instability of Yoriku’s continuously changing whims and refusal to share even a tidbit of his power, MedTech for handing him a humiliating rejection after six months of intense interviewing for a vice presidency slot in their marketing and development department.
“We’re very sorry, Mr. Keene. We know the interviewing has been extensive and time-consuming. In the long run, however, the process empowers us all by giving us concrete details on which to base the conclusion, as unfortunately we did in your case, that a candidate such as yourself would not be suitable for the executive position that is currently available.”
The royal we, the royal us. Presumably Keene was included in neither since his opinion that he would be a valuable asset to MedTech was summarily ignored. Twenty-three months since he had walked out of that building for the last time, and the degradation and rage still felt as fresh as it had when the words had first slammed into his brain.
So Keene sat in his mediocre-masquerading-as-plush office in the Synsound Building, and he laughed at MedTech as well, chuckled long and hard every time he thought of how he had made those self-serving and conceited sons a bitches look like basic horses’ asses by engineering and seeing to completion a corporate theft the likes of which the company had never dreamed would take place. Too bad he hadn’t been there to enjoy the expression on their uppity, blueblood faces the morning they showed up for work and realized their most secret project had been violated, their alien watchdogs were dead—not to mention the human security guards—and one of their precious alien eggs had disappeared.
And the game wasn’t over yet. Revenge was like that; a pawn here, a rook there, sometimes bending the rules to keep the tournament never-ending. But always…
One piece at a time.