A Talent For The Invisible (v1.1) Read online

  Delgado retrieved his snack, reached his other hand into the basket.

  “Care for some blood sausage, senhor? Made from one of my own pigs.”

  He cocked his head upward. “I have a pig farm up on the outskirts of New Lisbon.”

  “No, thanks.” Conger took a vial of kelp pills from his pocket, shook four into his palm.

  “These are the most healthy pigs you’ll come by, senhor. They eat only organically grown slop and I myself give each one a shot of antibiotic once a month. Did you ever inject several thousand pigs inthe …”

  “About the colonel,” said Conger.

  Giving a shrug, Delgado withdrew his hand from the picnic hamper. An immense clattering bang rose up from the ring. “Huh, the Masked Marvel fell down. That wasn’t supposed to happen.” He took a bite out of the sausage, turning to watch Conger. “Colonel Cavala is dead.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “I know who I shoot—after all, senhor.”

  “And it was Cavala you killed?”

  Delgado laughed. “I make my living now as a freelance assassin, senhor, and have since I left the service, after many happy years on the front lines in Angola. To survive as a freelance, and perhaps the same is true in your rather specialized line of work, you have to be good and dependable. Were I to shoot more than one or two of the wrong people I’d be finished.”

  “You knew the colonel well?”

  “At one time we were extremely close,” said Captain Delgado. “That was of course before he turned into a wild-eyed radical and soft-hearted liberal. He served together in the unfortunately unsuccessful campaign to regain Goa from those wretched Indians.”

  “Then you can be sure it was him you shot.”

  “Of course,” replied the plump man. “I did my job, I guarantee you. I don’t know why NSO is so worried.”

  “I’m not with NSO.” Conger ate two kelp pills. “I’m with RFA.”

  “Ah, you RFA people are not so … not so …” He made circles in the musty air with his sausage. “Not so daring and flamboyant as NSO. I rarely if ever get any work out of your organization.” He returned to eating for a moment. “Well, senhor, whoever you are working for you can rest assured Cavala is dead and gone. I put a hole through him right here … no, a little higher … right here. In through here and out the back with the best laser rifle you can get, a Russian-made job your NSO people bought me on my last saint’s day. Even the most gifted surgeons in the world can not patch up a man after that.”

  “Where do you think his body is now?”

  “Poor Cavala is buried in the family plot at the New Relocated Sacred Ground of Our Blessed Lady Cemetery,” said Delgado, jabbing a thumb toward the ceiling. “Up in New Lisbon.”

  There’d been a coded message about that waiting at Conger’s hotel as well. “One of our RFA men in New Lisbon checked this morning,” Conger told the assassin. “The coffin is empty.”

  “Merde!” Captain Delgado dropped his sausage and bread.

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “Of course not, senhor. My work is more taken up with another phase of things,” said the plump man. “I don’t keep track of all of them after I finish with them. But in this case, due to my sentimental feelings over our once pleasant association in the military, I attended poor misguided Cavala’s funeral. I saw him in his coffin. With a chest wound like that, you can display them if you dress them just so. I know it was Colonel Macaco Cavala they put in the ground.”

  “Somebody took him out again.”

  “That’s one on me,” admitted the plump assassin.

  CHAPTER 3

  The gargoyle was horned and scaly, made of sandy-colored plastic nearstone, and weighed approximately four hundred and ten pounds. It came plummeting down from one of the towers of the New Relocated Church of Our Lady of Fatima and hit the walkway three feet to the left of Conger.

  He had sensed the falling gargoyle a few seconds before it slammed into the twilight street of New Lisbon and thrown himself to the right. Conger lost his balance, kept himself from falling over completely by slapping a palm against the street. Tilted out like that, he glanced upward.

  A large black man was still at the parapet where the gargoyle had been.

  He gave a disappointed shrug, a darn-it swing of the fist before he went climbing away over the spires of the transplanted cathedral. “Big Mac,” said Conger, guessing who the statue pusher was. “So AEF is in on this, too.”

  A cluster of tourists, all in multi-color one-piece touring suits, had gathered around the fallen gargoyle. “You usually don’t get to see one of these up so close,” remarked a pleasant-looking man from Holland. He let his small robot camera loose and it began clicking off pictures, circling the ugly sprawled plastic statue.

  Conger uprighted himself, rubbed his strained wrist against his side. He back stepped away from the half dozen curious people, spun and walked quickly on.

  The Ritz-Mechanix Hotel was only two blocks from there, but Conger carefully walked a circular eight blocks before easing into a rear entrance of the twenty story building. He was to meet his other Portuguese contact here.

  The long green corridor he found himself in at street level was full of loitering cleanup androids. Here in New Lisbon they still favored the Negro mammy model, long since outlawed in the United States and most other English speaking countries.

  Selecting an android-picking tool from the small kit he carried strapped to his side, Conger doctored a hefty bandana-wearing robot maid. Then he ordered her, “Take me up to floor 19A in one of the service elevators.”

  “Oh, yassuh. I’se gwine ter be bodacious glad ter do dat little thing, suh,” replied the amiable android as she led him around a green bend.

  “Dis yere’s our mostest nicest ely-vator, suh.”

  When the elevator let him out on his contact’s floor Conger ungimmicked the android and headed for room 1926A. All the doors along this stretch of wall had freshly painted portraits of the current dictator of Portugal on them at eye level. Conger halted before 1926A, knocked his prearranged knock on the dictator’s broad nose.

  On the other side of the door someone yelled, “Voila!” There was a good deal of metallic clacking, followed by a jittering crash.

  Conger knocked again, this time on the triple chin.

  Finally someone called, “Momentito.”

  There was more clattering, followed by another zestful shout of “Voila!”

  “Enough already,” said the other voice. “Where’s that nitwit turnoff switch? There.”

  “Voila!” was yelled once more, in a running down mechanical way.

  “You’re pretty tall for a spy,” said a voice from immediately behind the door. “I’m giving you the once over through this nitwit spyhole. They didn’t put it in the right place and I have to stand on tiptoe. There.”

  “How about the counter knock?” suggested Conger.

  “Which?” asked the voice behind the door.

  “When I knock like this,” said Conger, knocking again, “you’re supposed to knock a certain way in response.”

  “Wait a second, I’ll try to remember. Is this it?”

  “Nope.”

  “You’re right. I can’t keep all these nitwit knocks straight. They put too many beats in them. Nobody can remember a knock that goes on forever. This is it. Am I right?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Okay, hold on and I’ll try to get this nitwit door to let you in. I wanted to stay at the Novo American but they tell me the RFA budget is tight this season and anyway the Ritz-Mechanix, being 90% automatic, will take better care of me. Is the door opening? No, it isn’t. Just stay right there while I give it a couple good taps with my shoe. Hold on and I’ll get my shoe off. Boy, the way they make shoes nowadays you can hardly remove the nitwit things. I don’t know about you, but when I was a boy shoes had laces instead of these little electric seams. Did you have shoes with laces as a kid?”

  “I w
ent barefoot a lot.”

  “Oh, really? My parents would never sit still for barefeet. I was considered too fragile, being the runt of the family. There, now I’ll wap it.”

  After a moment the door groaned, gave a chill sigh and slid aside.

  Standing in the foyer, his electric-seam shoe still raised high, was a man not quite five feet tall. He had curly blond hair and a substantial curly blond moustache. He was thirty-nine years old, dressed in a one-piece white fencing suit with a red heart stitched to its chest. “How do you do, senhor. I’m Canguru, the master spy. Come in.”

  Fallen, arms-wide, over the floating air column coffee table was a fencing master android. Though the teaching mechanism was turned off, it still made a low dry buzzing. “Taking up fencing?” asked Conger.

  “No, ballroom dancing, but the nitwit room service sent up the wrong machine. Since they did, and included this outfit, I gave the fencing a try.”

  Canguru guided Conger to a tin sofa, then sat opposite him on an imitation rubber divan. “Besides being a highly successful spy, senhor, I now and then do a little highjacking.” He leaned toward Conger, passing him a bowl of puffed potato balls. “Care for a snack?”

  “No, thanks.” Conger got a pillbox of vitamin B-Complex out of a side pocket, swallowed two capsules. “You’re supposed to have seen Colonel Cavala up and around.”

  “Exactly what I’m leading up to,” said the small spy. “A few days ago, while engaged in the highjacking facet of my career, I chanced to be behind the walls of the monastery of the San Joaquim Brothers.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Near the town of Vinda, some fifty miles from us, to the south,” replied Canguru. “It’s where they make Mizinga.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Have you never heard of Mizinga? It’s a world-famous liqueur. These nitwit brothers turn the stuff out. It contains over one hundred herbs and other ingradients. Only the San Joaquim Brothers, plus some six or seven robots, know the secret of Mizinga. Personally I don’t think they’re making it quite right, it could stand more anise, but you can’t argue with the public taste.”

  “Can people from the outside walk right into the place?”

  “No, senhor. The monastery is heavily guarded and well nigh impregnable. The thing is, being a religious order, the brothers don’t go in much for electronic guard stuff. Which is why I told RFA to get me an invisible man,” said Canguru. “In a while, when I find my nitwit electric pencil, I’ll draw you a map of all their fortifications.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I had the assistance of a Mother Superior of my acquaintance,” said the curly headed little spy. “However, we can’t work the same dodge twice. Wait, I’m going to find that nitwit pencil right now.” He left the imitation rubber divan and began hobbling around the long wide suite. “Boy, fencing didn’t do me much good. Now I’ve developed a terrible limp.”

  “Probably because you only have one shoe on,” suggested Conger. “Now what about the colonel, did you see him at the monastery?”

  “You’re anticipating the punchline. Let me track down my shoe.”

  “You set it on the aluminum table out in the foyer.”

  “You’re very perceptive, senhor. Have you been an invisible man long?”

  “What about the colonel?”

  “It was there at the monastery of the San Joaquim Brothers that I saw him.” Canguru located his other shoe. “He was in the chapel, dressed as a brother himself and lighting a candle at the shrine of St. Norbert the Divine.”

  “You certain?”

  “Would I sell the RFA a false yarn for 1000 escudos? No. I’m absolutely sure I saw Cavala alive and well several days after his funeral.”

  “Speaking of selling information,” said Conger. “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “You think I got my reputation as a master spy by double dealing?” He got his shoe back on his tiny foot, then stomped back toward Conger. “I told no one save your local RFA rep.”

  “An AEF agent tried to drop a gargoyle on me on my way over here,” said Conger.

  “A gargoyle?” Canguru blinked. “That’s very imaginative. Those Agrarian Espionage Force agents aren’t all nitwits.”

  “If AEF wants to kill me,” said Conger, “it means China II must know something about why I’m here.”

  “Sim, sim,” muttered the little spy. “Yes. China II is cooling toward your country and they hate our dictator here. They supported Cavala, may even have been prepared to finance a coup. It would be to their advantage to have Cavala alive. Which gargoyle did they drop on you?”

  “The one on the left hand parapet of the New Relocated Church of Our Lady of Fatima,” replied Conger. “It’s a homed scaly bastard with a face like this.” He made a brief gargoyle face.

  Canguru chuckled. “I know which one you mean. It must weigh five hundred pounds.” He returned to the divan, bounced down on it. “You have a genuine gift for mimickry. A shame you have to spend so much of your time being invisible. How is that done exactly?”

  “With a secret process.”

  “Actually you don’t become truly invisible, do you?”

  “It’s mostly an illusion, but it works. Within a range of a quarter mile or so,” said Conger. “Now you’d better draw me that floor plan of the Mizinga works.”

  “If Cavala was really dead,” said Canguru, rising again to hunt for his pencil, “then it means we’re dealing with something fairly awesome. To raise the dead is no mean feat.”

  “It’s a first rate stunt,” agreed Conger.

  The black android bellhops were tap dancing in the lobby. One of them did a series of splits, while his associates clapped and chuckled. The android’s highly-polished right shoe pointed at a man Conger recognized.

  It was the man with half a head of hair who’d teleported from New York to New Lisbon with him yesterday. The man was hunched in a yellow celluloid chair, pretending to read loose random pages of Moby Dick.

  When he realized Conger had noticed him he blushed.

  Conger had been striding toward the front exit. He was heading for the monastery of the San Joaquim Brothers this morning. “I wonder who this guy’s with,” Conger said to himself. “AEF, NSO or maybe even RFA.” He pivoted, walked into the hotel barbershop&gym.

  Back in the lobby the bellhops were tap dancing up a stairway of piled luggage.

  The robot head barber had been painted a glistening red and white. He looked like a fat barber pole. “ Bom dia, senhor,” he said as he took hold of Conger by the arm. “Which means dobry ráno in your language.”

  “That’s not my language.” Conger pulled free of the sweet-smelling machine.

  “You’re not Czech? Then I’ll bet it’s Hungarian. Well, jó reggel. “

  “And the same to you.” Conger walked on by a row of manicuring machines. “I’m in the mood for a steam bath.”

  “Ah, yes, fürdo as you Hungarians say.”

  “Exactly.” Conger kept moving toward the steamroom door.

  “I pride myself, you see, on being able to spot a man’s native country at a glance,” continued the candy-striped robot. “New Lisbon is, as you may know, something of an international crossroads, senhor. So one has to . . .”

  The half-bald man had cautiously crossed the barbershop threshold.

  Pushing his fragments of Moby Dick down into the slash pockets of his tourist smock he sat down in front of the first manicure machine he came to. “Ouch,” he said after a few seconds.

  The foyer of the steamroom was misty. A small android, speckled with beads of condensation, sat at a round rubber desk near the entrance doors to the dressing rooms. “ Bom dia, senhor,” said the android. “Which means …”

  “Jó reggel. I know.” He went by the seated android into the dressing rooms.

  “Um momento,” called the android. “There’s a fee of twenty escudos.”

  Conger jogged down a row of unused lockers, stopped at a de
serted spot, and became invisible. Unseen now, he went back the way he had come. The damp-skinned android, who’d left his desk to search for him, didn’t notice Conger at all.

  Conger stopped just inside the foyer door. In about three minutes the door was opened by the chunky semi-bald man.

  While the man was squinting into the blurred room Conger eased by him and went, invisibly, on his way.

  CHAPTER 4

  The squirrel stopped watching him. It eased out of the hole in the oak tree and skittered, head down, along the trunk to the leafy ground of the forest. In chasing a twig, the dust-colored squirrel hopped over Conger’s right foot.

  Conger nodded to himself. He was invisible now. He could still see himself but no one else, including animals, could. It had taken him nineteen months, working in the Wild Talent Division’s New England training school to acquire the knack. It was partially a mental control trick, adapted from an ancient Tibetan ritual by the late Vincent X.

  Worth. The rest of it depended on the careful use of a complex body lotion which, among other things, gave off highly pervasive mind-clouding fumes.

  Prepared now to assault the monastery, Conger left the wooded hills above the home of the San Joaquim Brothers. The monastery resembled a walled town. Covering something like twenty acres, it was surrounded by a high many-turreted wall of yellowish brown stone.

  The main entrance was equipped with electronic sensors, which would probably note his passing through. According to the map Canguru had penciled for him, the rear entrances to the monastery grounds relied entirely on armed brothers.

  Conger strode clear of the woods, cutting down through ankle-high grass. He moved along through a flat field which skirted one wall of the place, headed for the back side of the monastery. A bell in the chapel inside bonged out eleven, white doves flickered up into the clear blue morning.

  In the orchards beyond the monastery walls tan-colored robots, about a dozen of them, were spraying the peach and apricot trees with nozzle guns fitted to their wrists. A wooden wagon, pulled by a cyborg mare, came rolling across the orchard. A long-armed robot on the flatbed truck was snaking up the empty spray containers the robot tree dusters discarded.