The Free Lunch Read online

  The corners of her mouth turned up, but the result could not have been called a smile. “We call him up and invite him over for a chat.”

  And after looking at his expression, her own did become a smile.

  C H A P T E R 9

  ONLY A MOTHER

  Haines hated having to come to Conway.

  But it was his own fault. No one could approach him in his headquarters during daylight hours without being seen by others; Haines himself had planned it that way. And he must not be seen with Conway. And he needed to see Conway, right now.

  Back at his office, of course, many minions were no doubt buzzing over the Old Man’s first unexplained, unplanned departure from his office during business hours in longer than anyone could remember. But as long as they were buzzing, it meant they didn’t know anything that could hurt him. Haines rather liked his ant farm agitated.

  His second in command had tried to have him followed, of course. Haines had spotted the tail in the first six blocks and pointed it out to his driver, who said only, “Crash him or lose him, sir?” When Haines decided, “Crash,” the driver had nodded and touched the dashboard, and there had been loud sounds behind them briefly. Damned airbags…

  Now he said, “Hold on, sir,” and suddenly they were exiting the highway—from the left lane, and at the last possible second. Haines turned and watched carefully. No other car took that exit; none braked or changed lanes in an attempt to. He grunted in satisfaction and faced forward again, making a mental note to ask the driver his name, someday.

  If only Conway had proved as reliable!

  Most infuriating of all, Haines had no idea exactly what had gone wrong, or how badly. Only that it couldn’t be anything minor. Conway would not have called a secret emergency face-to-face to deliver good news.

  Still, the thought of the reaming he was now entitled to give the man was considerable consolation. He dwelt on that for several kilometers.

  A deserted road eventually brought Haines and his driver to an abandoned, fenced-off factory. The locked gate unlocked itself for them. They drove around behind the main complex, out of sight of the road, and stopped. Haines saw no signs of life. After a pause that he knew represented an ID check, a man stepped out from behind a Dumpster and directed them with gestures down an alleyway between two warehouse outbuildings. At the far end another man gestured to turn left. The doors of the warehouse on that side were open. The driver drove them inside and shut off the car, leaving one hand on the dashboard.

  Haines waited until he saw Conway approach, then got out. He had given his opening line some thought, and delivered it as soon as his target was in range. “How bad did you screw up?”

  Men like Conway do not flinch, but a vein suddenly stood out on the right side of his forehead. “The Mother Elf exists. My men had her and lost her.”

  Haines nodded. “Brilliant. Did they blow their cover?”

  “No, they all got clear.”

  He relaxed a bit. “Thank God for small favors. Tell me about it.”

  “She faked a heart attack. She shouldn’t have been able to fool them, but she did somehow. And then it turned out she’s got a son.”

  “Jesus,” Haines said in spite of himself. “So that’s why they call her the Mother Elf—”

  “Yah. Midget in his twenties. My man says he mistook him for a normal-size kid until the little bastard sucker-punched him and kicked his nuts in.”

  “Your man was alone?”

  “The rest of his team had gone to get the wheelchair they were going to take her out in. They took him out in it instead.”

  “Two men on the chair, one on the victim. Shrewd,” Haines said.

  “An old lady, having a coronary. Who knew there was another one? There aren’t any legends about him.”

  “Professionals should be prepared for anything.”

  Conway said nothing at all.

  Haines frowned. Conway was an unsatisfying man to ream. “Did your men get any information out of her?”

  Conway shook his head.

  “Did they accomplish anything useful at all? Aside from not getting caught by Security?”

  “We know for sure she exists now,” Conway said. “I say that makes her a lead pipe cinch to be the one smuggling Dwarves in and out. I never did believe it could be Avery—not without one of our spies getting at least a whiff of it—but it’s nice to know for sure.”

  One of Haines’ favorite bullying tactics was the sudden, unexpected explosion; he used it now. “It would be nicer,” he began mildly, bursting into an earsplitting bellow only on the last word, “to know WHY!”

  Conway gave no sign of noticing. “Yes,” he agreed.

  Haines gave up. Conway was no fun. “And so now you will…”

  “Go back in again—and get both of them.”

  “Now that they’re forewarned and expecting trouble.”

  “Yes.”

  Haines closed his eyes and nodded. The hell of it was, he believed Conway could do it. Maddening as all this was, it was, in the end, only a temporary setback. “Very well. I want at least one of them alive and talking. Don’t screw up this time.”

  Conway turned and walked away.

  Haines stared after him. When the man was out of sight, he shook himself slightly, and got back into his car.

  All the way back to the office he replayed the conversation, trying to understand what had gone wrong with the reaming. An employee who apparently could not be humiliated, even by the knowledge of his own failure, was a curiosity of great professional interest to Haines, like a woman who could not be frightened, or a politician who could not be bought.

  He was still puzzling over it as he seated himself again behind his desk. When the phone rang, he was more startled than angry, for he had not yet indicated to his electronic secretary his willingness to accept calls again. Furthermore, it was so late in the day that nearly everyone had gone home by now. But it was not his official line, he saw, but the private one. No more than a dozen living humans had that number, and he was certain it would be Conway. He picked up the phone, hoping the man had some new screwup to report, so he could try out an experimental approach he had thought up in the car. “Haines.”

  “You sound just as ugly as you look in your pictures, Alonzo,” somebody’s grandmother said pleasantly. “A remarkable accomplishment. Congratulations.”

  Haines knew he had never heard this voice before in his life. He drew in breath for a snarl—and held it. His pulse began to hammer. He was not an intuitive man, but suddenly, somehow, he knew.

  “You.”

  “Me,” she agreed. “The Mother Elf her own self.”

  He glanced at his call display and cursed silently. She was calling from a pay phone. Doubtless in Dreamworld. Big help. He triggered the recorder. “How’s your heart?” he asked sarcastically.

  “How’s your soul?”

  Haines had absolutely no reply to make to that.

  “We should talk,” she went on.

  “Go ahead.”

  “No, it’s got to be face-to-face or nothing.”

  “I’ll tell the doorman to expect you,” he said. “You be bringing your kid along? I’ll lay in some lollipops.”

  She chuckled grimly. “Don’t bother. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Now he was getting pissed. “You actually expect me to come to…” He couldn’t even say it. “…there?” If she said yes, he was going to say two words of his own and slam the phone down.

  Instead she said, “Avery only knows about two of your spies, fat man. I know about all eight.”

  The two words trembled on his lips, but he forced himself to swallow them. “Not there. Anywhere else.”

  “And I know who tried to crash the Hippogriff,” she went on inexorably, “and how…and who pressured her into it…and how.”

  Haines swallowed a lot more than two words then. He nearly choked on it, and his voice came out strangled when he finally said, “Okay. When?”

  �
��Tomorrow morning, during the Pageant.”

  “In broad daylight?” he groaned. “No way in hell. If anyone ever saw me there—”

  “Wear a disguise if you like. I’ll know you.”

  “No, God damn it, forget it. You’ll just have to—”

  “I have her suicide note. It’s very detailed, Alonzo.”

  His head spun. “Tomorrow’s no good,” he insisted, desperate to retain some shred of control, salvage something from this disaster. “Make it the day after if it’s gotta be daytime. I can’t just drop everything and get on a plane.”

  “Fine. There’ll be a message for you on the Big Board in the Octagon, telling you exactly where to meet me. And Alonzo?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You will suspend all operations here between now and then. Nothing more happens until we talk. Right?”

  Stop trying to kidnap her, in other words. “Sure,” he lied. “Hey, tell me something. The kid is Immega’s, am I right?”

  He was talking to a dead phone.

  He sat there with it in his hand, unmoving, for several minutes, not even hearing the recorded voice that kept telling him to please hang up. In the game of manipulation, he did not often lose. Twice in one day was a record—and all at once he realized the day was not over yet.

  Finally he accepted his fate, broke the connection, and called Conway to tell him they were going to have to meet again. Strike three.

  YOU’RE GOING? WAS all Conway said.

  Haines looked around the airport parking lot. “I have to. Never mind why. And you’re coming with me. I want you on the scene, directing this personally.”

  “She’s got something on you.”

  He ignored that. “I don’t intend to go in there with nothing in my hand but my dick. I need some leverage. An edge. As of now, I want you to pull your men off her and the kid. I want a couple of those bogus Trolls instead. As many as you can get me. Do it right away, at tonight’s shift change, in case they take time to crack.”

  Conway shook his head. “It takes time to set up even one extraction.”

  Haines was in no mood to be argued with. “I don’t care if you chloroform ’em in the parking lot and pepper spray all the witnesses,” he roared. “I want some Trolls, and I want ’em tonight!”

  Conway merely shrugged. “Okay. But they’re foot soldiers; they may not know much.”

  “They’ll know more than I do now. Even if they don’t, they’ll make good hostages. Come on, we’ve got a plane to catch.”

  C H A P T E R 10

  INTO THE TOILET

  “I’m not going to tell you the specifics of what I threatened him with,” Annie said. “You have no need to know, and it would only upset you. Just take my word for it: he’ll be here the day after tomorrow, on time. And between now and then, he won’t make any further attempts to kidnap me. Haines knows I’m dangerous, now.”

  Mike nodded. “Okay. Do you think he’s really going to stop sneaking fake Trolls in and out, in the meantime?”

  She looked pained. “There, I’m not sure. I don’t think he will. The way I read him, he always feels he has to cheat on any deal at least a little, as much as he thinks he can get away with: it’s the way he’s built. He may gamble that I won’t take the final step of blowing my own cover unless he takes another shot at me personally. And he’s right.” She rolled her head to relieve a crick in her neck. “And on the other hand, he might stop, at least until we meet and he has half a chance to kill me. I’d have a better idea if I had a clue what the hell those fake Trolls are all about. Maybe I was stupid to insist he stop. For all he knows, I already know what’s going on—and now I’ve thrown away my best chance to find out.” She frowned and rolled her head the other way. “But I couldn’t help it. I don’t like strangers traipsing through Dreamworld.”

  Mike came over and stood behind her chair, began massaging her neck, gently at first and then harder. She made a sound somewhere between a groan and a purr, tilted her head back, and rolled her eyes up until she could see his face. “Why didn’t you tell me you could do that?” she asked.

  “I didn’t think of it. Lean forward.”

  She did. After a while he widened his attentions to include her shoulder girdle. She guided him with little moans whenever he hit an especially good spot…then stopped when she realized he didn’t need to be told out loud. Minutes went by.

  “Annie?”

  “Okay, Mike.”

  “Huh? I mean—”

  “Whatever you’re going to ask me for, okay. That was the first neck rub I’ve had in thirteen years.”

  “Oh. Well, I wasn’t going to ask you for anything, exactly. It’s just I was thinking—”

  “Yes, I could smell it. And you thought—”

  “And I thought, even if Haines decides to keep his word, stop whatever he’s doing with the Trolls until you guys talk…”

  “Yes?”

  “Well…today’s load are probably already here, right?”

  Annie sat bolt upright, spun her chair to face him, staring. For a wild instant he wondered if he had offended her somehow, so intently was she staring. And then she smiled.

  “By all the gods,” she said softly, “I wish he was right.”

  “Who was right?”

  “Haines. He thinks you’re my son.”

  Mike was struck speechless.

  “You’re a genius. Of course today’s Trolls are in. And even if Haines pulled the plug as soon as he hung up the phone, the smartest and safest time to move those Trolls out is still tonight as usual, at shift change. I have at least one more shot at figuring out what they’re up to!”

  “We,” Mike corrected.

  She frowned. “Are you speaking French?”

  “I’m going too, this time.”

  She stood up. “In a pig’s eye.”

  “You said anything I asked for—”

  “Mike!” she said in her stern-aunty command voice.

  He shrugged it off. “Annie, I have to go.”

  “I have already explained why you mustn’t go—the sealed-letter principle, have you forgotten?”

  “Bullshit,” he insisted. “I figured out how to set up a remote terminal on my Band. Either of us can send the letter, from anywhere—we can be each other’s deadman switch.”

  “Mike, listen to me. The only way Haines knows of getting leverage back over me is to kidnap you. We have to keep you out of the line of fire at all costs—”

  “I’m telling you we can’t,” he said. “This might be our last shot, right? So we want to be as sure as possible we find at least one fake Troll, right? So what if none of ’em are girls?”

  Annie blinked. “I don’t follow.”

  “Exactly. I know where they hide during the day, okay? While they’re waiting for the shift to end. At least some of them—they must: it’s the perfect place! Nobody notices that you’re hanging around not doing anything for hours, nobody talks to you, nobody even looks twice at you—”

  Her mouth fell open as realization dawned on her. “Oh my God—”

  “The bathrooms. Employee bathrooms, with no security cameras, no parents waiting outside.”

  She was staring at him again. “And all the ones I’ve spotted so far were male,” she breathed.

  “I thought of it while you were out having your heart attack this morning,” he said. “I was thinking of it as a great place for Mr. Spock to beam down to…but it still works for a hiding place for humans.”

  She kept staring. “I have got to stop underestimating you. Or is it overestimating myself?”

  “I can pass for either a man or a woman, with you to make me up,” he said, pressing his advantage. “But you’d have a heck of a time standing at a urinal.”

  She snapped out of her trance. “Sit down.”

  “Why?” he asked warily.

  She pointed to the chair beside her. “Sit down.”

  He sat.

  “Now turn around. I am going to rub your neck.”


  “I’m going?”

  “Yes, you’re going, damnit, now turn around.”

  His smile hurt his face. “Cool.”

  For the first neck rub she’d given anyone in thirteen years, it was pretty good.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, Mike was getting tired of looking at washrooms.

  Sixteen, so far, and he’d seen a grand total of two Trolls. Each time, he paid no attention, pretended to pee, and left, then loitered outside…and each time the suspect Troll left the washroom shortly after he did. Each time, he called Annie by Command Band nonetheless and gave her coordinates to feed the satellite tracking program…and each time, she reported that they checked out as genuine Dreamworld Trolls.

  It had been fun at the start, being taken for a grown-up by everyone he passed, but that had worn off, too. Also, his feet hurt. As he approached his seventeenth employees’ men’s room, in a service corridor between the Enchanted Forest and Chip’s Backyard, Mike was strongly tempted to goof off, take at least a short break.

  Glancing at the time, he realized he might as well: it was nearly time for Firefall, and any seeming Dreamworld employee found in a washroom during Firefall would excite suspicion. Now, if ever, was when they would leave their hiding places and mingle with the crowds, working their way toward the employee exits while everyone else was staring at the sky.

  But he kept going. If it was nearly Firefall, it was nearly time for the shift to end—and tonight might be his and Annie’s one and only shot. Maybe he’d catch one coming out, and tail him to wherever they rendezvoused for departure.

  No such luck. He approached this washroom as slowly as he dared, but nobody emerged before he’d reached it. He debated whether to bother going in, and realized he actually did have to pee.

  Nobody inside—not even an Elf or Leprechaun or Dwarf. Not even a Cousin or other normal-sized employee. This was not surprising: both the Glade and the Backyard had other employee facilities more conveniently located than this one; Mike had already checked both. The room was so empty he could hear the echo of his own breathing. He remembered his space-aliens fantasy, reflected that here and now would be a smart place to beam down, and then was annoyed at his own childishness. To compensate he did a thorough job of searching the room, opening each stall door to confirm that nobody was hiding inside, perched on the crapper. He urinated then, zipped up, and began to leave. But as he was opening the door, an odd thing happened: the sound of his breathing got louder. He stopped in the doorway, and it got even louder.