Free The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn Page B

Cameron’s thousand-commark advance money and was feeling extravagant.
    Besides, reactions were so much more interesting when face and body language were there in addition to words and tone. And unless I missed my guess, the coming reaction was going to be one for the books. Feeding one of Cameron’s hundred-commark bills into the slot, I keyed in Brother John’s private number.
    Somewhere on Xathru, StarrComm’s fifty-kilometer-square starconnect array spat a signal across the light-years toward an identical array on whichever world it was where Brother John sat in the middle of his noxious little spiderweb. I didn’t know which world it was, or even whether it was the same world each time or if he continually moved around like a touring road show.
    Neither did InterSpiral Law Enforcement or any of the other more regional agencies working their various jurisdictions within the Spiral. They didn’t know where he was, or where the records of his transactions were, or how to get hold of either him or them. Most every one of the beings working those agencies would give his upper right appendage to know those things. Brother John’s influence stretched a long way across the stars, and he had ruined a lot of lives and angered a lot of people along the way.
    Considering my current relationship with the man and his organization, I could only hope that none of those eager badgemen found him anytime soon.
    The screen cleared, and a broken-nosed thug with perpetual scowl lines around his eyes and mouth peered out at me. “Yeah?” he grunted.
    “This is Jordan McKell,” I identified myself, as if anyone Brother John had answering the phone for him wouldn’t know all of us indentured slaves by sight. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Ryland, please.”
    The beetle brows seemed to twitch. “Yeah,” he grunted again. “Hang on.”
    The screen went black. I made a small private wager with myself that Brother John would leave me hanging and sweating for at least a minute before he deigned to come on, despite the fact that fielding calls from people like me was one of his primary jobs, and also despite what this vid connect was costing me per quarter second.
    I thought I’d lost my wager when the screen came back on after only twenty seconds. But no, he’d simply added an extra layer to the procedure. “Well, if it isn’t Jordan McKell,” a moon-faced man said in a playfully sarcastic voice, looking even more like a refugee from a mobster movie than the call screener had, his elegantly proper butler’s outfit notwithstanding. “How nice of you to grace our vid screen with your presence.”
    “I’m amazingly delighted to see you, too,” I said mildly. “Would Mr. Ryland like to hear some interesting news, or are we just taking this opportunity to help you brush up on your badinage?”
    The housethug’s eyes narrowed, no doubt trying to figure out what “badinage” was and whether or not he’d just been insulted. “Mr. Ryland doesn’t appreciate getting interesting news from employees on the fly,” he bit out. The playful part had evaporated, but the sarcasm was still there. “In case you’ve forgotten, you have a cargo to deliver.”
    “Done and done,” I told him. “Or it will be soon, if it isn’t already.”
    He frowned again; but before he could speak, his face vanished from the screen as a different extension cut in.
    And there, smiling cherubically at me, was Brother John. “Hello, Jordan,” he said smoothly. “And how are you?”
    “Hello, Mr. Ryland,” I said. “I’m just fine. I’m pleased everyone over there is so cheerful today, too.”
    He smiled even more genially. To look at Johnston Scotto Ryland, you would think you were in the presence of a philanthropist or a priest or at the very least a former choirboy—hence, our private “Brother John” nickname for him. And I suspected that there were still people in the Spiral who were being taken in by that winning smile and