Halo | Page 9

assemblage of pipe and wire stepped crab-wise as it sprayed a brick wall: a graffiti robot, a machine built and set loose to scrawl messages to the world at large. Gonzales could only read ... GENT OF CHAN ...
With a sigh from its turbines, the limo slowed to exit into North Seattle Airtrack, then turned into the private field access road. A wire gate opened in front of them as it received the codes the limo sent. Near the SenTrax hangar waited a swing-wing exactly like the one that had taken Gonzales from Pagan to Bangkok. Gonzales climbed into the plane, placed his bag and the memex's shock-cases into the plane's baggage locker, seated himself, and pulled his shoulder harness tight.
The swing-wing rose into clouds and fog. After a while, the blank whiteness out the windows and steady noise of the swing-wing's engines lulled Gonzales into a light sleep that lasted until the ascending scream of engine noise told him they were landing.
As the plane tilted, Gonzales saw the blue sheet of Lake Tahoe stretching away to the south, then a patch of green lawn on the water's edge that grew bigger as the swing-wing made its final approach to Traynor's estate.
From his six years' work with Internal Affairs, the past two as independent auditor, Gonzales knew quite a bit about Frederick Lewis Traynor, his boss. Traynor had wealth sufficient for even the most extravagant tastes--it was his family's, and he had known nothing else--but power whose smallest touch could shape lives, imprint stone, that he longed for. From his position as head of Internal Affairs, one of SenTrax's most powerful divisions, he plotted ascent to the SenTrax Board; he wanted to be one of the twenty people who had moved beyond negotiation and compromise, whose desires were reality, whims action.
In fact, Traynor had already achieved a level of eminence that is privileged, when it wishes, not to exist. His house and land occupied a chunk of the North Shore of Lake Tahoe where there had once been two casino-hotels and a section of state highway. The hotels had been demolished, the highway diverted. The grounds were now surrounded by a four-meter high fence of slatted black steel--alarmed, hot-wired, and robot-patrolled. The estate showed on no map or record of purchase, ownership or taxation; neither did the man himself.
When Gonzales stepped out of the plane onto a great expanse of green lawn, Traynor waited to meet him. He was short and pudgy, and his skin was pale. His sparse hair lay limp in dark curls on his skull. On his feet were soft black slippers, and he wore an embroidered silk robe--green and blue and white and red, with rearing dragons across back and front. He thought of himself as Byronic--eccentric and interesting, afflicted by genius--but to Gonzales and many others he appeared simply petulant and self-indulgent.
Traynor stretched his arms wide and said, "Mikhail," giving the name three syllables, saying it right, then took Gonzales in a brief hug. Traynor then stood back and looked at him and said, "You don't look too bad."
"Is that why you brought me here, to look at me?"
Traynor shrugged. "For that, maybe, and to talk to you about your next job. Besides, I like you."
Gonzales supposed that Traynor did like him, in his peculiar boss's and rich man's way. Particularly, he seemed to like the fact that Gonzales wasn't awed by the outward and visible manifestations of his money and power.
"Good breeding," Traynor had said to him once. "That's your secret: patrician and plebian blood mixed." Mikhail Mikhailovitch Gonzales was of mixed blood indeed; among others, Russian Jews and Hispanics from Los Angeles on his mother's side, Blacks from Chicago and Cubans from Miami on his father's. Among his family background were slaves and field workers and bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, along with the odd artist and smuggler and con man.
However, whatever his breeding or experience, he had to put up with lots of cheerful, condescending bullshit from Traynor, as he had to put up with Traynor in general, because the man was rich and powerful and the boss, and neither of them ever forgot it.
The two walked toward the house that stood facing the lake at the lawn's far border, a Stately Home an idealized eighteenth-century English architect might have built for an equally idealized and indulgent patron. Off a golden domed center stood three wings of creamy stone, the whole in restrained neo-Palladian with no modern excesses of material, no foamed colored concrete and composites, just the tan and creamy sandstone and rose marble speaking wealth and taste.
They climbed up marble stairs and passed into the house and under a looming interior dome that soared high above the central rotunda where the house's three wings joined. They walked down a hallway of dark wainscoting