12.
 About two in the morning, the door opened and she saw the room was packed with men in suits. Two of them stepped outside to smoke cigars. Before the door closed, she glimpsed two men in suits, sitting at a table. One of them was the handsome older man with gray hair she had seen getting out of the limo. The other was a swarthier, bigger man with dangerous violent eyes and a face as rigid as if it had been carved from granite. There would be some hard negotiating going on in there, Korinta knew. She hoped Dorio was listening to every word.
Then, about two-thirty, a car rolled into the parking lot. It sneaked up the access road behind her, casting a bright light from its headlights that raked across the ditch and almost caught her, except that she squeezed into a small crevice and pressed her head down so that her nose was flattened painfully on a stone and she inhaled the freshness of some desperate little succulent trying to survive in hell. The car headlight passed, turned right into the little access road, and then emerged with crunching tires on the parking lot. It rolled to a stop near the two smoking men, who stared at it with mild interest.
Obviously, they had been expecting whoever it was.
The doors opened, and out stepped Dorio Fleming, accompanied by several men and women in suits, who carried not guns for a raid but large satchels. Judging by the way they hefted the satchels, they must be full of money or papers or something—anything but weapons, for the gunmen by the door nodded greetings, offered to shake hands, and actually helped carry the bags. Into the room they all went. The door opened wide, exposing the knot of men inside and the two negotiators at the table.
Then the door closed again, and Korinta sat weakly beginning to tally it all up.
Tally she did, and what she came up with was that her boss, her friend, her mentor, Dorio, was a double agent. He had been bought, and he was going to help facilitate the merger of interests of these two deadly, vicious syndicates in their conquest of a large chunk of local time and space policed only by a very thin cordon of NBI agents.
But, she thought, Dorio’s being a traitor was so fantastic that she couldn’t believe her own eyes. Proof! She must have some proof to convince her that it wasn’t just some misunderstanding.
She looked at the dark building and thought hard. Dorio had told her in no uncertain terms that a meeting was going to go down. He had indicated it would be a dangerous situation. What had he said...he waited for them to do well so he could retire...what if that meant something other than she’d thought? Dorio also had to know that he had NBI agents on the premises—Korinta and Sparto—and which room they were in. Surely—
Sure enough, soon the door opened up, and four heavily armed men came out. They wore contemporary business suits and carried a mean and powerful looking assembly of weapons that she couldn’t make out—probably nothing that would startle local investigators once this was all over—no subgravity grenades, no grayhole masers, no brownmass pikes, nothing that would surprise a local cop who might come to pick up the pieces. Silence, that was one requirement. No point bringing the sheriff out here to investigate the sounds of a battle.
The four men walked under a street light, which cast their oddly teardrop shaped bodies in a strange light, and she saw that they were, in fact, the police. These were the otherly-enabled law enforcers in the brown chocolate cars. She could make out their open mouths, their ragged breathing, their slitty eyes. They looked like the chambermaids and busboys, had been copied on the basis of those dear otherly-enabled men and women, but were in fact something quite else.
They ascended the wooden outdoor stairs on silent, thick rubber soles. Like a pack of penguins, they moved together as they topped the stairs and headed along the deckway toward only one conceivable place—the room of Sparto and Korinta. Dorio had betrayed them. Dorio had betrayed NBI, the Government, the League, his own subordinates, everyone he knew. The syndicates would make him rich.
No, Korinta thought, she could not run across the lot and shoot them with the handgun—she must lie in wait until some opportunity came to strike, to save what could be saved.
|
Thank you for reading. If you love it, tell your friends. Please post a favorable review at Amazon, Good Reads, and other online resources. If you want to thank the author, you may also buy a copy for the low price of a cup of coffee. It's called Read-a-Latte: similar (or lower) price as a latte at your favorite coffeeshop, but the book lasts forever while the beverage is quickly gone. Thank you (JTC).
|
TOP
|
MAIN
Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
|
