A Gathering of Widowmakers (The Widowmaker #4) Read online

  "How's Jason Newman doing?" he asked when he'd gotten through to the head of Newman's surgical team.

  "The man has remarkable recuperative powers" was the answer. "His cloned organs should be ready to transplant in about six or seven days. Then it's up to him, but I'd say that at the rate he's regaining his strength, he could be out of here in a month, maybe even a little less, as long as he takes it easy."

  "He's not the type to take it easy," said Nighthawk.

  "Yes, I know. We got the whole story from a Cassandra Hill, who arrived two days ago."

  "Thank you," said Nighthawk. "I'll check in again in a few days." He broke the connection and turned to Kinoshita. "Why the hell did you tell Cassandra where he was? I thought he wanted you to wait."

  "I didn't tell her anything," replied Kinoshita. "She's a remarkable woman. I don't know if I ever told you the full story of what happened back on Pericles IV, but she's the one who actually led the revolt against her father. Newman was really just around for the end of it."

  "She sounds like an interesting woman," commented Nighthawk. "I'd like to meet her someday."

  "I don't know if that would be a good idea," said Kinoshita.

  "Why not?"

  "If one Jefferson Nighthawk could fall in love with her, why not another?"

  "You've got a point." Nighthawk walked out of the sending station. "Okay, let's see if the reward's been transferred here yet."

  They walked another block to the police station, where they learned that all three rewards had been paid. The two smaller ones had been transferred to a holding account on Giancola II that the hospital could draw from to cover Newman's bills. The reward for Bellamy was in the police department's account, awaiting Nighthawk's instructions.

  "We've deducted the price of shipping Bellamy's body to the Binder X bounty station," said the officer in charge.

  "Didn't they believe you when you vouched for his identity?" asked Nighthawk.

  "They took our word for the two others—they were atomized this morning—but for a multi-million credit reward, they want to run their own tests," answered the officer. "Still, they paid the money even before they checked it, so they're pretty satisfied with the data we forwarded to them." He paused, staring at Nighthawk, as if still trying to figure out how he'd managed to kill Hairless Jack Bellamy. "I assume you don't want your money in cash?"

  "No," replied Nighthawk. He scribbled down a twelve-digit number and handed it to the officer. "Just transfer it to this account at the local branch of the Bank of Deluros and tell them to route it to Deluros VIII."

  "You live in the Deluros system?" asked the officer, surprised. "I always figured you lived on the Inner Frontier."

  Nighthawk shook his head. "I do."

  "We could send it direct to your home world."

  "My home world has a branch of the Bank of Deluros," said Nighthawk. "I can get my hands on the money whenever I want, once you've deposited it."

  And, thought Kinoshita, this way no one knows where his home world is.

  "Well," said the officer, "we haven't had bombs in the building or riots in the street yet. Who are you going to bring us next?"

  "I was thinking of Cleopatra Rome."

  "Cleopatra Rome!" exclaimed the officer. "You don't believe in making things easy for yourself, do you?"

  "What can you tell me about her?"

  "I can tell you this: she's going to make killing Bellamy seem like child's play."

  13.

  Nighthawk decided that as long as they were out of the District, they might as well eat at one of Cataluna's better restaurants before returning. The establishment, modestly named The Apex of the World, was atop one of the city's tallest buildings, and from their table by a window they could look down across the District.

  "You wonder why they haven't simply dropped a bomb and wiped the whole place out," commented Kinoshita, gesturing toward the District as they sipped their drinks and waited for their meals to arrive.

  "Because they're not fools," answered Nighthawk.

  "I don't think I follow you."

  "The District looks to be about a mile square, give or take a couple of blocks," said Nighthawk. "New Barcelona's probably got ten million square miles, maybe more. But that little piece of turf, distasteful as its residents may be, unquestionably generates more money than the rest of the planet—hell, the rest of the system—put together."

  "They can't tax it, so what good does it do?" said Kinoshita. "It's strictly an underground economy."

  "Doesn't matter. Every single thing they buy in the District, from food to weapons to clothing, has to be imported, and the tariff rate is usurious—or it would be under normal circumstances. And the few legitimate businesses that have set up shop in the district just pass the cost along."

  "Are there any legitimate businesses?" asked Kinoshita.

  "Of course there are," answered Nighthawk. "There are the gun shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the bars. Even the drug dens have to buy couches from the furniture dealers who supply them; the same applies to the hotels and the whorehouses. You're making the mistake of looking at the clientele; try looking at the business owners. They were probably starving in the part of the city we're in now, so they moved to the District. They face a lot more risk, but the rewards are commensurate to the risk. A sandwich at that alien restaurant we ate at costs more than a six-course meal on the roof here—and you wouldn't believe the price that weapon shop was charging for burners and screechers." He paused. "No, if you want to send New Barcelona spiraling into a permanent economic depression, bomb the District."

  Their meal arrived at that point. Kinoshita had ordered a mutated shellfish in a cream sauce, while Nighthawk had a steak imported from Pollux IV.

  "I hadn't realized how tired I was of soya products," remarked Kinoshita as he dug into his shellfish.

  "I know, but your body is used to them. If anything's going to put you in the sick bay it's a rich meal like this when you haven't had one in months—especially with that alien lobster or whatever the hell it is."

  "It'd be worth it," said Kinoshita, taking another bite.

  "Did Jeff sample a lot of foods or stick to the safe stuff?" asked Nighthawk.

  "I never paid much attention," said Kinoshita. "I do know that nothing ever made him sick. You had a hell of a constitution when you were a young man. Hell, you still do."

  "It didn't stop me from coming down with eplasia."

  "When did you first notice it?"

  Nighthawk shrugged. "I don't know. When I was about in my mid-fifties, I suppose, though there might have been earlier signs of it. At first I thought it was just a rash of some kind, something I'd picked up on some alien world I'd visited. When it didn't go away I went to a doctor. He'd never seen eplasia, so he prescribed some ointment. I applied it religiously, and all that happened was that the rash got worse. After another year, and two more doctors who at least admitted they didn't know what the hell I had, I went into the Democracy to find a clinic that specialized in skin diseases." The muscles in his jaw tightened noticeably. "That was when they laid the death sentence on me."

  "How long did they give you to live?"

  "They didn't know. A year. Ten years. It didn't make any difference. They assured me that long before the end I'd kill myself—and once they learned who I was, they suggested that the day would come that I'd purposely lose a gunfight rather than keep on living."

  "They didn't know Jefferson Nighthawk," said Kinoshita.

  "It got pretty bad," continued Nighthawk. "There came a day when I'd look in the mirror, and there was more bone showing than flesh. My knuckles stuck up through the skin on my hands. I didn't have any hair, because there wasn't enough skin on my head to hold it in place. I gave anyone who saw me nightmares—not just kids, but grown men and women too. And there was a smell of rot and decay I couldn't get away from." He winced at the memory. "The smell was me."

  "And still you didn't kill yourself."

  "I w
as never afraid to die. You can't work in my business if you are afraid. But something inside me wouldn't let me just give up and kill myself—and purposely losing a fight would have been suicide. Maybe the onlookers and coroner wouldn't recognize it as such, but I would." He was silent for a long minute, and Kinoshita could tell he was reliving those final days with the disease, days when he had to force himself to look into the mirror or step outside where people could gape at him—or turn away from him in horror and disgust. "Then I heard about a very private, very expensive facility on Deluros VIII, at the center of the Oligarchy, where they were cryogenically freezing any man or woman with a terminal disease who could afford to stay frozen until a cure was discovered. The cost was better than a million credits a year, but I'd stockpiled twenty million credits, and I locked them in at eight percent interest."

  "Seemed reasonable," said Kinoshita.

  "It was," replied Nighthawk. "How the hell could I know that it would take them more than a century to effect a cure, or that the economy would go through an inflationary spiral for more than a decade? I was still locked it at eight percent, but suddenly it was costing five million credits a year to stay frozen. It didn't take me long to run through most of my principal."

  "That's when they created the first clone?"

  Nighthawk nodded. "They had to wake me up and get my authorization. I still remember it. I was too weak to sit up on my own, and when I saw my hand in front of me I knew I hadn't been cured. I thought they were about to tell me that they'd decided they could never come up with a cure." He smiled bitterly. "What they told me was just as bad. I was almost broke, and they were going to have to wake me and toss me out. The only alternative was to create a clone for some guy on the Inner Frontier who'd heard the Widowmaker was still alive and was willing to pay enough for a replica to do a job for him that I'd be able to stay frozen for a few more years."

  "That was the first clone—and my first experience with the Widowmaker," said Kinoshita. "He had all of Jeff's skills—all of your skills—but he had none of your experiences or memories or judgment. He fell in love with the first girl he met, a girl who was didn't give a damn about him and was working for men who wanted him dead. He let his heart rule his head—or maybe it was his gonads that ruled both of them. At any rate, it's something I never saw happen to you or Jason, and in the end it got him killed. But at least he accomplished his mission, and brought in some money."

  "Half of what he was promised, from what I've been told," said Nighthawk.

  "There was more than enough corruption to go around," answered Kinoshita. "His friends, his enemies, your barristers. Still, it was enough to keep you going for two more years, and by then they were on the way to curing eplasia. But they hadn't cured it before you ran out of money again, and that's when a second clone was created."

  "Jason Newman."

  "Yes, though I'm still not used to calling him that. He was Jefferson Nighthawk when I traveled with him and we took Pericles IV. They'd made a breakthrough in the science of cloning, and he was born with all of your memories. In fact, I'm told they had quite a job convincing him that he was a clone, because he knew he was you."

  "I never thought about that," admitted Nighthawk. "Yeah, I can see where that would be a problem."

  "Anyway, his mission paid enough to keep you alive and give you a nest egg when they revived you." He paused and looked across the table at Nighthawk. "I still remember the first day I saw you in the hospital. I'd have almost bet money you'd never wind up looking like a normal man. What was the toughest adjustment you had to make after being frozen for a century?"

  "Seriously?" said Nighthawk. "It wasn't the new technology. Technology is just another word for machines. You learn how they work, and you adjust to them or you don't bother with them. The biggest problem I had was being attacked by enemies the two clones made, men and women I'd never seen before and couldn't recognize. Hell, you were with me—you can remember. Every time I thought I'd found a planet were I could settle down and live out my life in peace, someone with a grudge against the Widowmaker, someone who'd been born sixty or seventy years after I was frozen, would come hunting for me. That's why I finally went back to Deluros VIII and had them clone Jeff."

  "Well, I'm glad things worked out and that you didn't end it all when you came down with the disease," said Kinoshita. "Though I'm not leading quite the life I had in mind when I was a young man just starting out." He paused and stared at Nighthawk. "How about you?"

  "I'm glad I didn't end it all too."

  "I meant, is this the life you had in mind when you were a young man?"

  "No," said Nighthawk. "I confidently expected to be dead almost a century ago."

  "Damn it, you know what I'm asking!" said Kinoshita. "What made you become the Widowmaker?"

  "Because I could."

  "What kind of answer is that?"

  "The best you're going to get," said Nighthawk. "Now decide what you want for dessert, or else I'll pay the tab and we'll get going."

  "Are you ever going to tell me about it?" persisted Kinoshita.

  "It's history," replied Nighthawk. "And evidently it's not even very good history. At least, whenever I see one of those holos they make about the Widowmaker, they're never the way it happened."

  "Maybe someday you should dictate your memoirs so there'll be an accurate record."

  "There's a record. Just follow the trail of bounties I've collected."

  "There's got to be more than just that."

  "That's what made me the Widowmaker," said Nighthawk. "If you want to know every meal I've eaten, every planet I've been to, every woman I've slept with, then you want the Nighthawk Laundry Lists, not the record of what made me different." He turned and signaled to the human waiter. "Make up your mind. Do you want dessert and coffee, or not?"

  "Not," said Kinoshita. "You're ruining my appetite."

  Nighthawk paid the bill, and the two men went back down to the ground level. Nighthawk stopped at a shop in the lobby specializing in alien tobaccos and picked up a small box of smokeless Greenveldt cigars.

  "How much?" he asked.

  "Sixteen credits, five Maria Theresa dollars, or six Far London pounds," said the robot clerk. "I cannot accept New Punjab rupees."

  Suddenly a woman came out from the back of the store and approached Nighthawk. "For the man who killed Hairless Jack, no charge," she said.

  "I pay my way," said Nighthawk.

  "Your money's no good here," she said. "I won't accept so much as a credit."

  Then he remembered his talk with the owner of the weapon shop inside the District and asked for a piece of paper. When she gave it to him, he wrote a glowing endorsement of the shop, proclaimed that he would buy his cigars from no other establishment on New Barcelona, and signed his name with a flourish.

  "Will you accept this?" he asked.

  She read it and a huge smile spread across her face. "I'll put it in the front window, Mr. Nighthawk."

  "We're square now?" he asked, preparing to leave.

  "Far from it," she said. "I'm in your debt." She stared at him for a moment, as if trying to make up her mind about something. "Maybe I can even the score. Lean over." Nighthawk bent down and she whispered in his ear.

  "You're sure?" he said, straightening up.

  "Absolutely."

  "Thanks." He lit a cigar and walked out, followed by Kinoshita.

  "That was a very generous thing you just did," said the smaller man.

  "I'd be like that all the time if I could."

  "But?" said Kinoshita. "There's always a but."

  "But as hard as I try to avoid it, the path I travel puts me in contact with a lot more Jack Bellamys and Cleopatra Romes than law-abiding cigar store proprietors."

  "It must be something in your character."

  "It wasn't anything in my character that caused me to leave my wife and my home and come to a cesspool like the District," said Nighthawk. "It was a would-be Samaurai named Kinoshita, who ask
s too damned many questions."

  "If that's the way you feel, I'm all through asking them," said Kinoshita in hurt tones.

  "Where have I heard that before?"

  They rode the slidewalk for half a block when Kinoshita spoke up again. "I have one more question, and then I'll be quiet," he said.

  "That didn't last very long, did it?" said Nighthawk, more amused than annoyed. "All right, go ahead and ask."

  "Where are we going now?"

  "Off to find Cleopatra Rome."

  "I thought you wanted to learn what her particular skills and abilities were."

  "I haven't got time."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The lady in the cigar store," said Nighthawk. "What she whispered to me was that if I had any intention of going after Cleopatra Rome, I'd better do it quick. The guy she's living with works at the spaceport, and Cleopatra Rome has booked passage out tomorrow morning."

  Suddenly the shellfish began doing flip-flops in Kinoshita's stomach.

  14.

  They came to the building that housed Horatio's and entered it, but instead of going to the airlift Nighthawk walked straight through the large lobby to the dilapidated men's room that was off in a corner.

  "That's not a bad idea," said Kinoshita. "I think I'll join you."

  The room was quite large, the remnant of better and more lucrative days. While Kinoshita sought out a urinal, Nighthawk walked over to the row of sinks and began carefully removing his weapons and laying them on long counter just above the sinks.

  He tested the battery on his burner, drew it out of his holster a few times to make sure it moved swiftly and smoothly, that there was no hidden grit on either the surface of the weapon or the leather of the holster.

  Next came the screecher. Nighthawk usually kept it tucked in the back of his belt, so the only thing he checked was the battery. He didn't like what he found, so he removed the coin-sized power source, tossed it in a trash atomizer, and inserted another.