Dragonback 05 Dragon and Judge (5 page)

"No kidding," Mustache growled. He plucked the comm clip from her
collar and slid the bag off her shoulder. Almost as an afterthought, he
reached under her jacket and took the Corvine from its holster. Putting
his palm against her chest, he shoved her backward into one of the
chairs. "Morgan played it cute and sent in a stooge to pick up his
goods."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Alison insisted. "That's
my
bag and
my
stuff."

"Where is he?" Mustache asked, sitting down in the chair facing
her. Checking to make sure the comm clip was still off, he set it and
the bag onto the table in front of him. The Corvine he tucked away
inside his own jacket.

Alison had had plenty of time to get her puzzled look ready.
"Where is who?" she countered. "I don't know any Morgans."

"Of course you don't," Mustache said. "You just happened to find a
lockbox key lying there on the street."

"No, I went in and opened my own lockbox," Alison said.

"I don't think so," Mustache said. "I paid good money to be
alerted when Virgil Morgan's box was opened. It was. You were the only
one who left the bank." He picked up her comm clip. "You want to call
Morgan and tell him to show or we kill you? Or would you rather I do
that?"

"Okay, look," Alison said, feeling sweat breaking out on her skin.
This was
not
what she'd signed up for here. "I don't know any
Virgil Morgan. I'm a thief—okay? I tap into bank computers and find out
which lockboxes haven't been opened for a while. Then I go in and clean
them out."

"Right," Mustache said contemptuously. "And you just happened to
pick Morgan's box first?"

"What first?" Alison countered. "This is the fifth box I've opened
at that bank this week."

"And the manager didn't notice anything strange about that?"
Sideburns put in.

"The manager's a Trin-trang," Alison said scornfully. "And the two
tellers were Compfrins. They couldn't pick out a human face between
them."

"So you've been here a week?" Mustache asked.

"Three weeks," Alison corrected. "I came in from Pintering on the
Missing
Link
."

"You have a payment receipt, of course?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Alison said. She did, too, since one
of the first lessons her father had hammered into her was to always,
always
carry proof of having been somewhere else. "You want to see them?"

"Maybe later," Mustache said, looking at Sideburns again. "What do
you think?"

"I think we should call the boss and see what he wants to do,"
Sideburns said, pulling out a flat, palm-sized UniLink. Punching a
couple of buttons, he held it up to his ear.

Slowly, Alison looked around the room. A UniLink instead of a comm
clip meant that the boss was off-planet, and that he liked the kind of
privacy that a UniLink's heavy encryption provided. Whoever had
accidentally sicced Mustache and Sideburns on her, it wasn't just
somebody with a casual grudge against Virgil Morgan.

"Semaline, sir," Sideburns said. "We just had a ping on Morgan's
lockbox . . . no, sir, it was a girl. She claims not to know Morgan, that
she taps bank lockboxes for a living."

He listened a moment, then looked at Alison. "Empty your pockets,"
he ordered. "Everything on the table."

Alison complied, laying out her set of keys, her makeup kit, her
wallet, her small multitool, and her pen and notebook. Sideburns
gestured to the keys, and Mustache picked them up and sorted quickly
through them. He paused a moment at the one Alison had showed the
Trin-trang, then continued on. "No bank keys here," he reported when
he'd reached the end.

"How'd you open the box?" Sideburns asked.

"How do you think?" Alison retorted. "I picked the lock."

"Right in front of them?"

"I'm good at what I do."

"She says she picked it," Sideburns relayed. Again he listened a
moment, then gestured to the wallet. Mustache tossed it to him, and he
opened to the ID. "Alison Kayna," he read aloud. "No, sir, not to me."

He looked at Alison. "He wants to know if you do anything besides
simple lock picking," he said.

Alison shrugged. "Sure. Combinations, time-beats,
freeze-darks—pretty much the whole range."

"Let's find out." Sideburns glanced around, pointed at a
half-curtained doorway leading to the cafe's back room. "There'll be a
safe somewhere back there. You're going to open it."

Alison didn't miss a beat. "Oh, no, you don't," she said darkly.
"I know how these little games work."

"What, you think we're
cops
?" Mustache scoffed.

"I'm not doing it," Alison said firmly, folding her arms across
her chest. "And you try to repeat what I just told you and I'll
flat-out deny it. You cops are all alike."

Mustache gave a theatrical sigh and dropped his hand to his side.

And suddenly there was a gleaming pistol six inches from Alison's
face, pointed squarely between her eyes. "Listen to me, little girl,"
he said quietly. "You're, what, fifteen?"

"Fourteen," Alison managed between suddenly dry lips. In that
single heartbeat she was back on Rho Scorvi again, fighting for her
life.

"Do you want to live to reach fifteen?" Mustache asked. "The boss
wants the safe open. You're going to open it."

Alison's pulse was thudding in her throat, her arms and legs
starting to tremble, her stomach wanting to be sick.

Then, like a slap across the face, something slid subtly across
her skin beneath her shirt . . . and in that instant, the terrible
feeling of helplessness vanished.

Because she wasn't alone. She had Taneem. And if the young K'da
female wasn't nearly as well trained as Jack's own poet-warrior friend,
Alison had seen enough of Taneem's abilities to know the kind of help
she would be in a pinch.

She took a careful breath, rubbing her shoulder gently as if
massaging a stiff muscle. Taneem took the hint and subsided. "All
right," she said. "For five hundred."

She had the satisfaction of seeing Mustache's eyes widen slightly.
"
What
?"

"Five hundred," Alison repeated. "I know the law. If you pay me to
commit a crime, it's entrapment and you can't charge me."

"This is
not
—"

"Give her the frinking money," Sideburns snapped.

Glowering, Mustache put his gun away and pulled out his wallet.
"Two hundred up front," he growled, dropping the bills on the table in
front of her.

"All right," she said, forcing calmness into her voice as she
stood up. She'd convinced them—maybe—that she wasn't associated with
Jack or Virgil Morgan. But cracking safes wasn't really her area of
expertise, not like it was Jack's. The whole thing could still blow up
in her face. "I'll need my tools."

Mustache gestured to the items scattered around the table. "Help
yourself."

Alison picked up her multitool and makeup kit. On the other hand,
she would bet heavily that her collection of gadgetry was a lot more
impressive than anything Jack had.

The safe was in a tiny office, tucked away beneath a cluttered
desk to the right of the kneehole. It looked to be a typical low-end
device: standard tumblers, with probably only a single-stage hazer to
block audio intrusion. "Well?" Sideburns prompted.

"Patience is a virtue," Alison reminded him as she opened her
makeup kit and pulled out the slender powder case.

"What's that?" Mustache asked.

"It's powder and powder applicator," Alison said, throwing him a
scornful look as she snapped it open. "Don't you know any actual women?"

"What's it for?"

"It helps cover skin blemishes and imperfections—"

"I know what it's
supposed
to be for," Mustache snapped.
"What are
you
going to do with it?"

"With the powder?" Alison asked, unscrewing the mirror set into
the case. "Nothing." Setting the case aside, she held the mirror by the
edge and squinted through one of the pinholes in the back.

They were there, right where she'd expected: a trio of infrared
lasers slicing invisibly through the space in front of the desk. "Got
some pingers blocking access," she said, handing the mirror to Mustache.

He peered through the pinhole a moment, then handed it back. "Nice
gadget," he said. "Must have set you back some."

"You just have to know where to shop," Alison said, setting down
the mirror and pulling out her mascara tube. Unscrewing the bottom end,
she wedged it into her ear. Then, being careful to avoid the lasers,
she pressed the open end of the tube against the escutcheon plate
beside the combination dial.

A soft hum of static issued from the earphone: the hazer she'd
expected. She counted off the seconds as the tiny computer inside the
tube analyzed the sound, patterned it, and phase-countered it.

Before her count reached thirty, the sound was gone. Single stage,
all right. Leaning forward, again being careful not to brush the laser
pattern, she got a grip on the dial and started turning.

Two minutes later, with the clicks from the tumblers as loud and
solid as if the whole thing had been a basic training exercise, she had
it.

"Careful," Mustache warned as Alison pulled the door open a couple
of inches.

"I know," Alison assured him, stopping the door's swing before it
reached the nearest of the laser beams. "I trust there's nothing in
here you actually wanted?"

Mustache raised his eyebrows at Sideburns, who had been murmuring
a running commentary on Alison's progress into the UniLink. "Go ahead
and close it," Sideburns said. "We'll continue the conversation in the
main room."

"Okay," Alison said when the three of them were back in the cafe
proper again. "What now?"

"The boss is impressed," Sideburns said. "He wants to offer you a
job."

Alison shook her head. "Sorry. I'm kind of booked at the moment."

"Interesting choice of words," Sideburns said, gesturing to the
shoulder bag. "Considering we have some stolen property here with your
fingerprints and DNA all over it."

Alison glared at him. "You said you weren't cops."

"We're not, but we don't mind turning scum like you over to them,"
Mustache said.

"Or you can listen to the boss's offer," Sideburns suggested.

"Like I have a choice?" Alison growled, suppressing a sigh. Jack
had made it clear he didn't really want her on the
Essenay
.
This was his big chance to get rid of her for good. "What's the job?"

"Basically, the same thing you just did," Sideburns said. "He
wants you to open a safe."

"Where?"

"You'll see when you get there."

"Where?" Alison repeated. "I need to know up front how dangerous
it's going to be."

Sideburns made a face. "She wants to know where," he said into the
UniLink. He listened a moment, then nodded. "It's on Brum-a-dum."

"No police, no curious bystanders, no awkward questions," Mustache
added.

"That helps," Alison said. Brum-a-dum was the planet where Jack
had briefly been made a slave a couple of months back. Interesting that
whoever was chasing Virgil Morgan had also picked that world to—

Her throat seemed to squeeze shut. Someone currently on
Brum-a-dum. Someone looking for Virgil Morgan. Someone who desperately
needed a safe opened.

Arthur Neverlin.

Oh, no
, she thought, her heart suddenly racing.
No no
no no no
.

"You'll get twenty thousand for doing the job," Sideburns went on.
"Any equipment you need will also be provided."

And if that
was
Neverlin on the other end of the
conversation, that meant the safe had to be one of the ones from
Draycos's advance team, containing the rendezvous data for the main
fleet. The information Neverlin needed if he was going to destroy the
refugees.

The same information Jack and Draycos needed if they were going to
save them. "Must be a tricky safe," she managed.

"Very tricky," Sideburns agreed, his voice darkening. "I trust you
weren't going to try to talk up the price?"

That had, in fact, been exactly what Alison had been planning to
do. It would be expected of a professional thief.

But one look at Sideburns's face and she changed her mind. "Twenty
is fine," she said. "But I also want private passage away from there
when I'm done, someplace like Capstone or Glitter. Brum-a-dum isn't a
place I want to get stuck on."

An actual, real smile touched Sideburns's lips. "I don't blame
you," he said. "Don't worry, they'll make sure you get out of there."

Alison felt a shiver run through her. Yes, they'd get her off
Brum-a-dum all right.

But not to some nice, safe, civilized world. More likely to some
nice, quiet, lonely grave. "Okay, it's a deal," she said. "How do I get
there?"

For a minute, Sideburns listened to the UniLink, his forehead
creased with concentration. "Yes, sir," he said. "Yes, sir. Don't
worry—we'll be there."

Shutting off the device, he put it away. "The boss has a ship he
can divert this way," he told Mustache. "It'll be in the system in four
hours—I've got the coordinates for a quiet rendezvous."

"Fine." Mustache pointed at the shoulder bag. "What about this?"

"Might as well send it along," Sideburns said. "Unless it's full
of money."

Mustache opened it and peered inside. "Old newspaper and magazine
clippings, copies of bills of lading and invoices, and a few fuzzy
photos," he reported, sifting through the contents. "And a couple of
data tubes. No money."

"In that case, send it along," Sideburns said. "The boss might
like to see what Morgan's been hiding all these years."

Mustache handed the bag to Alison. Looping the strap over her
shoulder, she scooped up the rest of her personal belongings from the
table and stuffed them back into her various pockets. She reached for
her comm clip—