SIMS

SIMS Page 53

Luca Portero went directly from the CEO's office to the parking lot where he picked up one of the SimGen Jeeps. He grinned as he drove out the gate.

A million-dollar reward - and Sinclair thinks it was his idea. Doesn't have a clue that I steered him into the whole thing.

The meeting had been a thing of beauty, he had to admit. Knowing Sinclair-1's obsession with SimGen's public image, Luca had simply parceled out the information - first playing dumb about the xenografts, then mentioning an unaccounted-for sim, then hinting that she might be a witness - letting Sinclair pounce from one to the next like a mouse following a trail of cheese bits, until he'd ended up right where Luca wanted him.

A reward! Put SimGen in the news: The corporation with a heart as big as its market cap value!

Putty in my hands, Luca thought.

His grin faded as he thought about what lay ahead. Another meeting. This one with Darryl Lister. He and his old CO hadn't had a face-to-face in almost a year, which could only mean that the subject was as delicate as it was important.

That made him uneasy. Worse yet, they were meeting at Luca's house.

He pulled up the long drive to the rented two-bedroom cabin in the center of five acres of dense woods. He liked the isolation. This was his retreat from SimGen and lost sims.

Lister wasn't due for another half hour. Still plenty of time to get Maria out of the way and -  He hit the brakes when he saw the black Mercedes SUV parked in front of the house.

Lister? Shit!

He still had time to salvage this. Was Lister alone? With the late morning sun glinting off the SUV's windshield, Luca couldn't tell how many were in the car.

When he pulled up next to it he was startled to see that it was empty. He hurried through his front door and found Darryl Lister sitting on the couch, sipping a beer. Maria stood behind him, rubbing her hands together, her dark eyes wide with anxiety.

Luca stared at Lister. This plump country squire type was miles away from the hardbodied CO who'd parachuted with him onto the Shahi Kot mountains. He was a pogue now, in his late forties, and the brown corduroys and bulky white Irish wool sweater he wore couldn't hide the inches he'd been adding to his waist. And judging from the new gelled-up style of his light brown hair, it looked like he'd started going to a fag barber. The man was becoming a stranger.

"Luca." He rose and smiled as he extended his hand. "I was going to wait in the car, but then this sweet young thing surprised the hell out of me by opening the front door. I invited myself in." As they shook hands, his smile faded. "Who is she, Portero? I know you don't have any kids. A niece?"

"No one you have to worry about."

"You know the rules."

Luca held up the car keys."Maria, esperame en el auto."

She scurried around the couch. Her jeans and bulky flannel shirt couldn't hide her ripe young figure as she grabbed the keys and ran out the door. Luca noticed Lister's eyes following her all the way.

"Nice," he said. "What is she? Sixteen?"

Luca felt invaded. He wanted to tell Lister it was none of his fucking business, but bit it back. To a very real extent, itwas Lister's business.

"She's old enough," Luca said.

Maria had told him she was eighteen, but she might be even younger. He'd seen her begging on an East Village sidewalk last summer. Maybe it was her flat peasant face, or the desperation in her black eyes...something about her spurred an impulse from a nameless place to shove a couple of singles into her hand. He heard her soft, "Gracias, senor," saw the sudden faraway look in her eyes as she clutched the bills between her breasts like a family heirloom, and he had to speak to her. Good thing he knew Spanish because she didn't know anything else.

He bought her lunch, took her to a Spanish film at the Angelika, bought her dinner, then brought her home. She'd been living here ever since. She cleaned his house, cooked his food, kept his bed warm at night, and thought she'd found heaven.

"She's an illegal who's young enough to be your daughter, right?"

True on both counts, but so what? "Don't worry. She doesn't know anything. Can't speak a word of English."

"But Iam worried. It's against the rules. You're supposed to be a model citizen. A clean nose, no legal hassles. That's the deal when you come in. You agreed, now look at you: shacking up with a barely legal illegal."

"No one's going to know. Not way out here."

"Butour people will know. Sooner or later you know they'll find out. And they won't like it. And since I sponsored you, that will reflect on me."

"Look - "

"They've already got questions about you. Like why you don't seem to own anything. You rent this place and..." He looked around with distaste. "And it looks like you furnish it from secondhand stores."

"It came with the territory. It's a furnished rental."

"I know we pay you enough to afford to buy."

Of course they did. But Luca saw no point in tying up money in real estate. He wanted no anchors. When the time came to move on, as it inevitably would, he wanted to be able to pick up and go without a second's hesitation, without a single look back.

"It's the way I've always lived."

"I know. I've tried to explain that to them. They don't care. They want you settled in. I went out on a limb to get you this cushy assignment, but if you don't put down some roots, they'll transfer you out to Idaho. And I'll have egg on my face."

Luca had spent a few months at the Idaho facility and had no desire to go back.

He held up his hands in surrender. "Message received. I'll see what I can do about buying this place."

"Luca," Lister said, smiling as he put a hand on his shoulder. He rarely called him by his first name. "You're making good money. And you'll be making better and better money. Enjoy it, for Christ's sake. That's what it's for. You can't take it with you."

Luca nodded. "I guess you're right."

But he was thinking, Youcan take it with you - if you've got it squirreled away in a secret offshore account.

Luca believed in being prepared. He'd learned that from his mother. She might have been a whore, but she was no dummy. She always kept a roll of cash hidden away for what she called "the rainy days," when the cops periodically would raid her place and roust her out. The cash had always kept her out of jail.

The same held true here. Who knew when the weather would change? He could handle the proverbial rainy day, but SIRG played rough, and if a shitstorm struck, he believed in having a safe harbor to hole up in. His was in Hamilton, Bermuda.

He repressed a shudder. If SIRG ever found out about that account...

"But that's only half the reason for this face-to-face," Lister said.

"If it's about the missing sim," Lucas blurted, relieved to be moving away from his personal life, "I just enlisted Mercer Sinclair's help - a million-dollar reward."

Lister was looking at him. "So you told him?"

"Not yet. Not till I find the sim. I've got people combing the city, visiting any place that uses sim labor. This reward will flush out anyone who's seen her. Once I have her, the Sinclairs can take over."

Lister frowned. "You might have had this sewn up by now if they'd been on board from the start."

"They'd have added nothing but panic." Bad enough to have Lister calling twice a day, he didn't need the Sinclairs yammering in his ear every free minute too. "And don't forget, it took days for the fire department to sift through all the rubble. Until they reported no sim remains, we didn't know for sure she was missing."

"Still, if this million-dollar reward had been announced days ago..."

"You know my problem with telling SimGen too much."

"This 'leak' you suspect?"

Luca nodded.

Lister shoved his hands in his pockets and looked around. "I thought you were way off base with that at first. Now I'm not so sure."

"Why? What's happened?"

"The Manassas attorneys met with the Cadman woman and Sullivan. What a farce. She could have walked away with millions but she's asking forbillions in damages."

Luca wanted to laugh. He'd known they couldn't buy off Romy Cadman.

Just hearing her name set off reactions within him, part anger, part lust. Sometimes when he was with Maria, moving inside her, he thought of Romy Cadman. Young stuff like Maria pushed his buttons,all his buttons, but that didn't mean he didn't have anything left over for a prime piece of mature tail like Cadman.

"Did you agree to pay it?"

Lister stared at him. "You're not serious."

"You should have called their bluff, just to see what they'd do. Because we all know they're not after money. But what does this have to do with a leak?"

"The Cadman woman said she'd come to the Manassas office because she wanted to know why a truck leased in Idaho by Manassas was driving around the SimGen campus."

"But..." Luca's heart stalled, then picked up again. "But there's no connection. Those leases are paid through Golden's credit card."

Hal Golden was dead, but no one knew that. His body lay six feet deep in a field in Thailand, but his credit record, active and pristine, lived on in the computers of the finance world. Golden had never even heard of Manassas Ventures while he lived, so how had Cadman and Sullivan linked him to the company?

"I know that. But at one time Manassas leased them directly. Somehow she made the connection. And I'm beginning to wonder if she might have been tipped."

"But that doesn't make sense. If someone's leaking her information about Manassas Ventures, wouldn't they tell her everything?"

"You'd think so, wouldn't you. But whatever her source, somehow this woman has identified Manassas as the tie between SimGen and our Idaho facility."

"So then, why not just abandon Manassas? It served its purpose."

"It's not like some dinghy you can cut loose at sea and forget. It's part of a chain of subsidiary corporate entities that this Sullivan fuck has already traced back four or five levels. This haseveryone upset."

The way Lister emphasized "everyone" made it clear to Luca that this went far up the SIRG ladder.

"They want the woman and the lawyer stopped," Lister added, staring at him. "And since you were in charge of the Cadman woman when she saw the truck with the Idaho plates, that puts this square in your lap. They want you to take care of it."

"What? Take her out? If anything happens to her, anythingfinal , Manassas Ventures will be a prime suspect."

"I'm talking aboutinformation , not termination. She's obviously not alone in this. They want to know who's behind her. They want her source. And if there's a leak in SimGen, they want to know who it is. Word has come down: This has equal priority with the missing sim. Understand me, Luca? This isn't me talking to you." Lister suddenly looked uncomfortable. "This comes from the Old Man himself."

The Old Man? Luca swallowed. That meant this wentall the way up the ladder, and all eyes would be on him. Damn Romy Cadman for mentioning that truck. It almost seemed like she was doing everything in her power to screw him.

"Word is he's raising hell how if you'd done the job right the first time, when you rolled Sullivan's car off the Saw Mill, we wouldn't be facing this now."

Luca felt sick. "Jesus..."

"I went to bat for you, sent the Old Man your record in Operation Anaconda and the Baghdad sorties, and apparently that carried some weight. You know, soldier to soldier. He's giving you a chance to redeem yourself. That doesn't happen too often."

"I'm grateful," he said, forcing the words past stiff lips.

Luca felt a growing pressure in his head. Was someone out to get him...dump more on him than any one man could handle, then wait for him to buckle under the weight?

"I'll help you with the logistics and anything else I can," Lister told him. He looked fidgety now. Maybe Luca wasn't the only one being given a second chance. "We'vegot to know who she's fronting for." He glanced at his watch. "Got to run."

Luca followed him outside to the cars. He waved to Maria and jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the open front door. She jumped out of the Jeep and ran back into the house.

Again, Lister's eyes followed her. "Remember what I said about putting down roots."

"Roger that," Luca said.

But not till he saw how all this settled out. Until then he wanted that Bermuda account as fat as possible.

"And ditch the kid. Put her back where you found her."

"Will do."

Lister smiled. "Or marry her."

"I don't think so."

He'd miss Maria, miss her a lot. She loved sex, cooked up a storm, and was crazy about him, would doanything for him. Maybe he'd keep her around till he found a replacement. Someone who could -  Luca's PCA chirped. He flipped it open and turned away from Lister as he spoke. "Yes."

"This is Grimes. We found her. She's been hiding out in a sim crib."

Relief flooded through him. "You have her?"

"Not yet. But we've got an address and we're on our way."

"Where's the crib?" Luca listened as Grimes read off a Newark address. "I'll meet you there."

He ended the call and turned back to Lister. "One of my men. We've located the missing sim. We're on our way to pick her up." He grinned at Lister. "One problem down, one more to go."

"Let's hope so," Lister said.

Luca jumped into the Jeep. Newark. Not a long drive. And the timing could not be better. Tying this up would free him up to devote all his energies to Romy Cadman, and settling with her once and for all.