When the fire door had slammed into place, Artemis pulled the other chair over and sat down. She offered Hermes a glass of water, then sat in silence as he drained it in one toss. “I see you’ve enjoyed the operation so far.”
He responded with an ironically lopsided smile.
She poured water for them both, then drained her own glass. As Hermes stared absently into his, she said, “You know the game’s just begun.”
He sipped the water, then stared at the wall of monitors through the glass. “I thought this was the end of the line for me. Endgame. No more playing Mercurial Mob Boss. Bye-bye Me, it’s been fun.”
She laughed with the twang of a dozen bowstrings. “Yes it is, but you don’t really expect me to let you out of all your worldly holdings easy as that, do you? No, I’m going to make you work for it!” She leaned in, “Otherwise what satisfaction would there be in the revenge?”
He shrugged, “What would I know of revenge? You and your dear twin brother have the market cornered.”
She laughed again, thirty bowstrings this time. “Not by a long shot! But I’m glad you acknowledge my superiority in the field. Flattered. But when the crime is as serious as what you perpetrated against me, revenge must be especially sweet. Come.” She stood and strode the two paces to the video wall.
When he didn’t move, she smirked, “What’s the matter, worried about multiple paternity suits? Don’t.”
Standing made the floor spin, then it raced at him with the sound of fifty bowstrings laughing. A hand grabbed him and yanked him onto a chair. Only the chair was now next to the console and his sight was filled with 12” television screens. Each screen’s view was familiar. There was Club Social, and there Dèpanneur Villeray. That was Freefall’s hangout, and over there Chez Wanda. That was an external view of his de Gaspé flat and that one was inside the living room of his Carré St.-Louis townhouse. There were sixty monitors lining the wall, and every one contained a view from his life. Each screen a voyeuristic window into one or another part of his world. Except that he wasn’t in any part of his world right now. He was here in a room where people kept watch on his world, or a large part of it. Quite a large part of it. The entire top row showed scenes from his interests outside of Québec. There was the diamond growing plant in Boston; the medicinal plant research station outside of Manaús; the sex trade palace in Ho Chi Min City. That was the research and development facility that designed the sheet of Gryphon e-paper Artemis had been inspecting when he entered.
A single bowstring whispered in his ear, “You like it? Complete surveillance. Look here.” She pointed at a screen on the bottom row. It showed a view from inside a well-appointed car, camera positioned behind the driver’s shoulder. The road over the Pont Jacques-Cartier was clearly in view, as was most of the dashboard and a pair of the Twins’ baby slippers hung from the rear-view mirror. His rear-view mirror. Artemis leaned over the console and said, “Salut Jean. Ça va bien cheri?”
The driver—a woman, of course—glanced over her shoulder and replied, “Salut Boss. Tout va super. Il ha l’aire que tous les agents ont sur ma cue.”
Artemis grinned, “Excellent. Continue.” She turned to Hermes, “That means both your people and Johnny Freefall’s are about to step into a trap. But just in case you’re thinking that camera’s only been there a few days…” she pressed a couple of buttons and the monitor switched to recorded footage. First she played a scene with him pulling up to his Lac à la Loutre lodge at least a year ago. He could tell the date by the identity of his companion. Then she showed him talking on his cell animatedly, haggling over the price of computer components about four months ago. The passenger door opened and Frenzy flumphed in with an overstuffed bag of popcorn. Hermes put his cell on mute and berated Frenzy for leaving a greasy mess wherever he went. The next scene was on his date with Lizereli, driving up Boulevard St.-Laurent. The Sibero-Cuernavacan pulled out her makeup mirror, spied the camera and turned around to blow it a kiss.
“Now there’s a woman who’s dedicated to her work. That’s why I hired her. Should’a joined the Mounties. She knows how to get her man, and keep him as long as she wants.”
Hermes threw his hands up and turned around slowly in the chair. “Okay, so you’ve been spying on my every move and you probably know more about my affairs than I do.”
“No, I just know them from a different angle, that’s all.”
“Bully for you. What do you want?”
“Yes, the billion dollar question that you already have the answer to. So why ask?” She pulled up the other chair and set her elbows firmly on her knees. “I’ll indulge you anyway, brother dear. Last time we met, you stole from me everything and everyone I loved. You took everything I cared about, everything I’d spent human generations building and made me watch helplessly as it slipped away beyond my reach. I know you’ve lost everything many times; we all have. That’s what happens to gods when they get put out to pasture. But the way you did it is was so heartless, I’ve never known even a mortal to exhibit such cruelty.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“Okay, you’re right. But you destroyed my world in New York so thoroughly that I couldn’t even show my face around the family dinner table.”
“Artemis, we all need to play against type sometimes, and there’s no shame in running a string of bawdy houses, but when men in every town you operated in turned up dead and mutilated, I had to do something.”
“Yes I know. ‘It was for your own good. You can’t operate that way or you’ll blow the cover off the whole family.’ Well you gotta pile it on pretty thick to get a shade o’ bullshit like that, Mister Illuminati. Take a look at any one of us today and the veneer between fact and myth is so thin you could sneeze and blow it halfway to Venus. Or Mars. Or Neptune for that matter.”
“So what, you’re jealous you didn’t get a planet named after you?”
“Shut up, you’re distracting. Smoke and mirror tricks. Here’s what I want. I want you to sit here and watch as I dismantle your little underworld empire. Or you can wear yourself into an existential crisis trying to save it. The choice is up to you.”
Chapter 8, section 9: Surrounded and cornered
She went on to inventory his interests and describe the steps she had taken to undermine them. The list was complete, including interests that were purely speculative and all of his bread and butter businesses. In every case, Artemis had pushed the situation close to the breaking point, but not past where it could be rescued if he acted fast.
The squadrons drilling outside the control room were preparing for raids on his local smuggling operations: natural diamonds, heroine, cocaine and hashish. Other squads were preparing for raids on their overseas counterparts, as well as those not directly connected with Canada or the United States, which were mostly sex-trade related. It promised to be the biggest and most elaborate sting in history. The women who had been hanging around Chez Wanda weren’t there just for kicks. They agitated and organized a movement among the dancers to buy out the official club owners. It would be a very hostile takeover, and an expensive one. But one of Artemis’ operatives would approve the speculative financing agreement. The money would come from his smuggling operations after they were shut down. Chez Wanda would become the first dancer-owned strip club in North America. Other more traditional hostile takeovers were being executed on his high-tech research and development operations, including the diamond manufactury and electronic paper developer. The medical research facility in Manaús was also about to be swallowed, specifically by the pharmaceutical giant Glaxo-Anapharm, the trouble with the Brazilian government being only the opening salvo in that operation.
She went on at length, describing in detail the state of disarray his entire empire was in, and how she had managed to hide the warning signs until his kidnapping. But he tuned out after the Glaxo-Anapharm venture. Some of the other companies and groups the world would be better off without or it would make no difference who ran the show, but that one was a mistake. Giving a pioneering medical outpost into the hands of a multinational drug conglomerate was a grave error in judgment. She should have left that one alone. He knew that his own activities weren’t always in humanity’s best interest, but the Manaús operation was a pet project he hoped would benefit mortals for many generations to come.
Suddenly he realized that she had stopped talking and was staring at him with that searing gaze, waiting for a response. He had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he had missed her question.
He met her eyes and said, “So?”
“So on your word the endgame will begin. One way or the other. Your choice.”
“What about the Twins?”
“Prison, probably fifteen-to-twenty five. Life would be nice, but you kept them out of trouble too neatly.”
“Frenzy?”
A sixty-bowstring twang, “Pan? Life would be a verrrrry long sentence for him. I wish I could hang the bastard myself, but life will do. It’ll be a while before the wardens realize that he’s not aging.”
“There are some flaws in your plan.”
Silence settled a moment before Artemis nodded, reluctant. “Yes. You have a couple of offshore accounts that I haven’t found a way to touch. But that’s all.”
“That’s what I thought.” He stood unsteadily and walked to the table. He filled two glasses with water and brought them both back to the console. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.”
Artemis drained her glass, and sneered, “This ought to be good.”
“It’s not much given the grand scope of your plan, but it would tie up that loose end.” He sipped from his glass and continued. “You say make a choice: behind door number one, find the Devil; behind door number two, find the deep blue sea. I already chose. Choice was obvious when I realized that something was going on and the power behind it was you. I had no idea what your plan was so it’s unlikely I could do more than run interference, but if I chose to, I would not have walked meekly into your trap like a lamb to slaughter. Call it a touch of the old existential angst. Itchy feet. Boredom with excess. Whatever. I offer you completion of your grand scheme, with my active participation.”
“And what do you propose to get out of it?”
“Humanitarian Intervention.”
This time eighty bowstrings twanged in laughter. “You? Humanitarian? Boredom I believe, but humanitarian? Hermes, you are a bundle of contradictions so sick and twisted that you profit from the trafficking and sexual enslavement of young women, yet you want to deal for ‘humanitarian intervention’ while your empire crumbles down around your ears! Sometimes I think I have you all figured out, and then you spout a non-sequitor that’s supposed to complete the puzzle. You are a mad, mad man, Mercury.”