"Cannery moved around a lot from planet to planet, which was one reason why he was so hard to catch. I tracked right along after him, without his ever knowing I was on his trail. Finally we got to Cordoba; just when I was about to close in, he opted to come here to Sanctuary. I had no choice but to come along. I didn't dare kill him aboard the ship; there would have been too few suspects, and I would probably have been found out.

  Here there were a lot more people, and I had a better chance to escape undetected." He paused and looked straight at Jules. "But I swear to you, Carnery was the only person I've ever killed in my entire life. I don't regret it, either. Nothing can make me feel sorry for what I did to that bastard-not after the butcher job he did on Miri."

  "Wait a minute," Jules said. "You told us aboard ship that you killed someone on Cordoba and had to get off the planet in a hurry. That was why you came to Sanctuary."

  Belville smiled sheepishly. "I lied, there. When I found that Carnery was coming to Sanctuary, I knew I'd have to get myself into some trouble before I'd be allowed along. I followed a pair of blasterbats who worked for one casino owner, and watched them kill someone who'd welched on a bet. Then I framed myself for the murder, leaving my fingerprints and enough clues that the police would think I'd done it. That was my creden- tial to get aboard. I've told you so many lies in the past you may not believe what I've just said, but it's the truth, I swear it."

  Yvette looked at him solemnly. "I believe it." Then she turned to her brother. The expression on her face dared him to contradict her.

  Jules took his time deciding. Belville's explanation was a logical one. It explained the murder, the expression on the Newforester's face in Carnery's cabin, and all the other discrepancies in the man's behavior. The emotional outburst Belville had just displayed was genuine, Jules was sure of that. And while he could not condone Carnery's murder in so grotesque and bloody a fashion, Jules could not exactly condemn Belville for it either; under those circumstances, he might have done the same thing himself. He imagined someone doing that to his own fiancee, Vonnie Roumenier, and he shivered.

  Besides, Belville had risked his own life to save theirs. That ought to count for something.

  "Khorosho," Jules nodded, "I believe you."

  "There's something I'd like to get clear myself," Belville said. "Now that we've gotten my identity straightened around, what about yours? From all the things you've been doing, from this terrible grilling you've been putting me through, I have the definite feeling the two of you are not just burglars."

  "We are the cat burglars the police on Cordoba were looking for," Yvette said, hedging the issue.

  "But that's not your full occupation, is it?"

  Jules had to hand it to Belville; the man was no fool. "I'm afraid we can't say anything more about it for the time being."

  Belville looked to Yvette, who just shook her head. "Please don't ask," she said.

  The Newforester shrugged his shoulders. "Then for the moment I'm a gambler and you're a pair of cat burglars-and all of us are running in fear of our lives. We can't sit here too much longer without being discovered, so I presume we must either make some plans to hide or get ourselves off this planet as soon as possible."

  Yvette shook her head. "There's something else we have to do before we can leave. A friend of ours is in trouble."

  "Yes, I saw her with you for a while during your fight."

  "We have to either bring her with us or know for a fact that she's dead."

  Belville gave a low whistle. "That's going to take some doing. You don't happen to have a small army tucked in your pockets, do you?"

  Jules put a hand on the other man's shoulder. "This isn't your fight, you know. You've already done more for us than we have any right to expect. You're free to walk away and take your chances on your own."

  Belville shook his head. "It's too late for that now. The guards will think I'm with you, so they'll be hunting me just as strenuously. Our fates are linked together for better or worse," he said, looking particularly at Yvette. Then, with a wry grin, he added, "Till death do us part, apparently."

  "Welcome to our team, then," Jules said, and got down to business. "The odds are that they'll be keeping Hel... our friend at the safest place they've got, which will be their headquarters. They know we'll be coming after her, so they can set up their defenses as tightly as they know how."

  "Do you have any idea where their headquarters is?" Belville asked.

  "We think so," Yvette replied. "The address we were given is 666 Crowley Drive. That should be the first place we check."

  "I agree," Jules said. "And we'd better do it soon, because we won't stand any chance if they catch us flatfooted in this alley. Our best hope lies in being mobile, so let's get moving."

  Chapter 11

  Playing With Fire

  Garst was literally stunned by the gold mine of information be was able to extract from the hapless Helena. The more he probed, the more he learned about the innermost secrets of the Service of the Empire. It made him respect SOTE even more than he had-and it made him hungry to start some plans of his own.

  Imagine using the Circus of the Galaxy to get your best agents onto any planet you wished, he thought. The talents of the d'Alembert family must be incredible and particularly this Jules and Yvette. No wonder they've behaved so spectacularly. But they're not invincible. If I hadn't acted so foolishly I could have killed them earlier tonight.

  But it was no matter, he knew. As long as he had the von Wilmenhorst woman, they would come to him. They would pick their own particular time, but he could choose the battleground for this particular fight-and it would be here, in the nerve center of his entire operation, where he was surrounded by guards and foolproof defenses. Let them come, he was ready for them.

  Helena was slumped over in her chair after nearly two hours of fruitful interrogation. She was in a coma that would last for at least twenty hours. This was the last stage of the effects of nitrobarb. Either she would emerge from her coma at the end of that period or she would slip into a quiet death. Garst hoped she would live-she might still have some uses-but he would not shed any tears if she died.

  He stood up from his own chair and stretched his legs, which were stiff from sitting so long. He had important things to think about. Although Lady A had told him her organization knew virtually everything SOTE did, he had strong doubts that she knew about the d'Alemberts and the Circus. According to Helena, that information was so secret that it had never been written down or put into computer records; it went purely by word of mouth, and only a few top people in SOTS-plus, of course, the Imperial Family-were privy to that information.

  This meant he held a vital key that the others didn't even know existed. Knowledge, he knew, is power. By rights, he should have placed a call immediately to Earth to alert Lady A of his new findings. He didn't have her exact corn number; he would, as always, have to leave a message with an impersonal machine and she would call him back at her convenience. That, she said, was so that if he were captured he wouldn't be able to lead anyone to her. He suspected, though, that she also wished to maintain the social distance between them; familiarity, so the theory went, bred contempt.

  But, as the thought of Lady A fled through his mind, he knew he was not going to tell her of his discovery. If she was going to keep secrets from him, it was only right that he keep a few from her. There had to be some way he could capitalize on his new knowledge, and it would only take him a little time to think of it.

  But those were thoughts for the future. He forced his mind back to concentrate on the here and now. Jules and Yvette d'Alembert were still loose somewhere on Sanctuary, along with their mysterious ally whom even Helena didn't know. Three people, two of whom were the top SOTE agents in the entire Galaxy and one of whom was a total unknown. But even if his skills were somehow equal to the d'Alemberts-he certainly couldn't be better-that still would leave them hopelessly outclassed. Even after the debacle at the spaceport, Garst still had over a hundred guards in his security force.

  That was more than enough to deal with only three people.

  He buzzed the intercom for Rawling. When her face lit up in his screen, he asked, "What's the guard deployment?"

  "I've got a double shift working the port, a double shift standing sentry here in HQ and the rest out on a search pattern."

  "Pull in the search teams. Our friends will have to come to us if they want to get the girl, which they do. We should concentrate rather than disperse our forces."

  "Khorosho." Rawling jotted down the order on a piece of paper. "Anything else, sir?"

  "Yes, take off all the exterior guards from this complex."

  "Sir?" The security chief's tone was clearly dubious. "We don't want to discourage them; we want them to come in. A good trap should be like a spiderweb-very easy to fly into and very, very difficult to leave."

  "Smooth, Sir. I'll get on it right away."

  The d'Alemberts and their new ally made their way cautiously through the back streets of the city toward the address Helena had given them. As she'd indicated, it was near the spaceport, back in the direction from which they'd come. They met with no resistance as they moved, a fact that made Jules distinctly edgy.

  The building at that address was a low, flat white structure, flanked by several others just like it. Its front was almost forty meters across, and it seemed to extend for hundreds of meters away from the street. There was a chain link fence around the building only one and a half meters high, and a yard five meters wide before the wall of the building. The front facade was absolutely bare except for the numbers 666 right beside the door.

  There was just the one portal, and it was only wide enough for one person at a time to enter. There was no sign of any windows anywhere around the outside of the building.

  "Getting in is going to be a bit of a problem," Jules said "We can't just walk in there one by one; well be blasted where we stand, without a chance to fight back."

  "Maybe there's a copier entrance on the roof," Belville suggested.

  "Perhaps, but the area's so well lighted we'd never get across it without being spotted,"

  Jules said.

  "There's got to be more than that," Yvette spoke up. "What if there's an emergency? There has to be some way of getting people into and out of there in large numbers, otherwise the design is inefficient. And whoever planned this setup is far from inefficient."

  "Well, I can't see anything that looks even remotely like that," Belville complained.

  They were all silent for a moment as they strained their eyes against the darkness of night to make out details on the building. Finally, Yvette spoke up again. "Speaking of seeing things, we've been here for several days and I don't recall ever seeing any cars like the one you rescued us in-nothing but those damned carts that only go fifteen kilometers an hour. Where did you find that thing, anyway?"

  "Some guards drove up in it and climbed out, leaving it empty and ready for the taking,"

  Belville explained. "I don't know where they came from, and I wasn't about to question that particular gift horse-not when it was needed so badly at the time."

  "The streets aren't really built to accommodate them," said Jules. "It's pointless to use sleek machines like those on the same avenues the carts are on; the carts would slow them down to a crawl. Again, it would be inefficient."

  "So," Yvette continued the line of reasoning, "there would have to be special roadways where the black cars can travel by--themselves, unhindered."

  "I haven't seen any trace of that," the Newforester pointed out.

  "Exactly," exclaimed Yvette with enthusiasm. "Which means that they've been placed where no one will see them."

  "Underground?" Jules asked. Yvette nodded. "That's my guess."

  "I can imagine it-a whole series of interconnected roads under the surface of the city itself, radiating out like spokes from a wheel-probably with this headquarters building as the hub." Jules was catching his sister's enthusiasm for this theory.

  "With arcs crisscrossing the radii at intervals. And there would be nodes or special access points to the surface, well disguised up here. That way a squad of guards could be dispatched from headquarters to anyplace in the city in a matter of minutes and seem to appear from nowhere."

  "Is it possible to do all that underground?" Belville asked.

  "You've obviously never been to Vesa or you wouldn't ask that question. That entire moon is honeycombed under the surface with tunnels and caverns. The technology has been in existence for centuries. Where have you been hiding?"

  "Newforest," Belville said abashedly. "We're a bit provincial there, I'm told."

  Jules was becoming impatient. "The best plan of at tack," he began, "is to ignore this door. It's certain death to go in there. But with an underground labyrinth as complex as theirs must be, they couldn't possibly guard all the routes at office. We'll find some way to slip in."

  "As soon as we find an entranceway to the underground system," Yvette pointed out.

  "But even if we get in, they'll have a thick cordon of guards all around your friend," Belville said. "We won't be able to penetrate that wall."

  "We can take care of both problems at one and the same time," Jules said with confidence. "I have a plan." Half an hour later, the alarm bells began ringing in the security office and throughout the headquarters complex. Jinda Rawling flipped several switches on her desktop console to find out what the cause was. At almost the same instant, Garst buzzed for her on the intercom. She was perfectly capable of handling both situations at once; even as she continued to seek the information, she was responding to her boss. "Yes, sir?" "What in hell is happening?"

  "Just a second, sir." The information came through as she was speaking. "Let's see-fires have broken out in three different apartment buildings, all widely scattered."

  "Three, eh? That's a very convenient number. It looks like our friends are trying their hands at arson as well as mayhem."

  "Yes, sir. I'll send out the fire units." "No."

  "But sir..."

  "We can't send out anyone. That's what they want us to do, dilute our forces down here so they can attack. We have to remain strong if we're going to win."

  "But the clients..."

  "Will just have to take care of themselves. This is far more important."

  Rawling snapped off with a bitter "Yes, sir" and broke the intercom circuit. She didn't know what to think, except that it was very obvious her superior had a monomania on the subject of those agents out there.

  Fifteen minutes later, three more fires started. Then three more. Then three more.

  Rawling buzzed Garst's office. "Sir, we've got to do something about those fires."

  "Absolutely not; We cannot weaken security at headquarters."

  Rawling lost her temper. "Begging your pardon, sir," she said in a cold fury, "but what in hell good does it do to protect headquarters if the whole drapping city burns to the ground?"

  "We need to make those agents come to us and we need to stop them dead. It's vitally important."

  "Please tell me what's so important. I'm dying to know."

  Garst did not dare confide in the woman that he knew these agents were SOTE's top operatives; he knew she would tell Lady A at the first opportunity, and his monopoly on the knowledge would evaporate. "The deaths of those people will be, in the long run, far more important than a dozen Sanctuaries."

  "But why, sir?" Rawling reiterated.

  It was Garst's turn to lose his temper. "Because I gave you a direct order, that's why. If you won't obey it, IT find someone who will." And he clicked off the intercom.

  The security chief sat staring at the blank screen for thirty seconds, trying to make some sense out of her boss's orders. She finally came to the conclusion that they made no sense; on the subject of those SOTE agents, her boss was simply not sane. He could not make an objective decision. No three people could be special enough to risk the destruction of an entire city in order to ensure their deaths.

  I was hired to be security chief of this entire planet, she thought. It would be a betrayal of my responsibility to let the city be burned to the ground on the whims of a madman.

  She had disobeyed a direct order earlier that evening, and had saved the day because of it; it looked as though she would have to do the same thing again.

  Reaching for her microphone, she broadcast orders to her troops. Two squads were to remain on duty in central, with orders to kill the intruders on sight. One shift was to remain on duty at the port. The rest of her people were to take the fire-fighting equipment and go out to battle the blazes that were erupting all over the city.

  As an afterthought, she decided to go out on the guard lines herself, so that she would be away from her desk and Garst couldn't reach her as easily. As far as she was concerned, the man-who had proven himself quite capable before today-had suddenly turned into a raging creature of unreason. She made a mental note to report his behavior to Lady A at the first opportunity.

  Two squads should be perfectly capable of defending this place against three people, she thought as she strapped on her blaster and strode rapidly out of the office.

  Up on the surface, pandemonium would have been too gentle a word to describe what was happening.

  The fires started by the d'Alemberts and Pias Belville were all in residential apartments, where the majority of Sanctuary's inhabitants could be found at this time of night. While the buildings did have automatic machinery to take care of small fires, the d'Alemberts had been trained in some tricks of the incendiary trade, and were able to quickly explain them to their ally. As a result, these fires were stubborn ones, and would not be quelled by automatic machinery. Soon whole buildings were ablaze, and the residents were fleeing to the streets for their lives.

  When no guards appeared to fight the fires, more were set, and still more. "They have to come out sometime," Jules reasoned, "or they won't have anything left to defend."

 

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