The Long Run | Page 2

co-processors, MPUs, like that. Half the webdancers I know buy from them."
"Frank Calley," said Jerry Jackson with a convincing enough display of anger, "is a thief. He lifted fifteen terabytes of hot RAM, a hundred and five thousand Credit Units worth of room-temperature superconductor memory, from mah warehouse in Georgia." Under the stress of anger, the accent became more audible.
A single drop of rain touched down on the transparent tabletop in front of Trent.
"Let me guess," Trent said.
"Guess?"
"You want me to get your RTS back."
"Yes."
"What do you think you know about me?"
A touch of the anger was back in his voice. "You're supposed to be a thief yourself." The word 'thief' was laced with astonishing disdain. "You hire out to steal things for people. You--"
A second drop of rain joined the first. Jerry Jackson cut himself off as a waiter, after an anxious glance at the sky, hurried out to where they were seated.
"Monsieur," said the waiter hurriedly, with a French accent that might have been real, "you wished to order a cup of coffee?"
"A pot," Trent corrected him. "A whole big pot of coffee."
"Monsieur, we do not sell coffee by the pot, only by the cup."
"May I speak to your manager?"
The waiter's features stiffened visibly. "Oui. One moment, monsieur."
Trent waited until the waiter had gone back inside. "So you want me to boost fifteen terabytes of RTS from CalleyTronics?"
"Yes."
Trent counted five drops of rain on the cut crystal surface of the table. Six. "It probably can't be done--straight boost, I mean. Calley's real tight with the power structure in the Patrol Sectors, and his security's pretty good. You'd be better off with a con, something that would leave him wondering if he'd been hit--not sure--and feeling so stupid he wouldn't go to the Peaceforcers with it for fear of being laughed at."
Jerry Jackson leaned forward with what seemed to Trent to be honest curiosity. "What do you have in mind?"
"I don't know. What's good here?"
"Regarding Calley," Jerry Jackson said with great control, "what do you have in mind?"
Trent looked at the man blankly. "Nothing. I'm not going to boost Frank Calley for you, and I'm not going to con him either. Look, have you ever eaten here before?"
"Never."
"Oh. Too bad. Usually when I go to a new restaurant I like to go with somebody who's been there before, so I know what's good. You may not know this," said Trent, "but two years ago a Player scored some image co-processor hardware off CalleyTronics, chanted Calley's accounting computer to believe the hardware had been properly paid for and had it shipped to a drop box. It took Calley half a year to find out who'd done it, but that summer they fished a corpse out of the East River. His teeth had been pulled with pliers, his eyes were poked out, his fingers had been chopped off, and his features defaced with acid. They identified him by his inskin."
"You won't take the job?"
"Am I being asked?"
"Yes."
"No."
Jackson took a deep breath. "Why not?"
Trent shrugged. "No percentage. If I was going to, I'd do a con to get Calley coming after me, get him to believe I had something he wanted. But I'm not going to. The guy's mean, but he's also pretty straight; guys like him always go to the Peaceforcers."
A gorgeous, mature woman in a black evening gown came out to their table, with the waiter a few steps behind her. "Monsieur?"
"Yes?" said Trent politely.
For some reason his response seemed to throw her. Her accent was considerably better than the waiter's; Trent would have bet she was actually French. "You wished to order ..."
"Coffee."
"An entire pot?"
"Please."
"We do not sell coffee by the pot, monsieur. We do not even have a pot to put the coffee in; the coffee is brewed in a single large--" She hesitated, searching for a word. "--vat? Yes, vat, brewed in a vat in the morning, and then put in stasis and poured from stasis a cup at a time."
"Okay. I want five, no, make that seven, seven cups of coffee, each one about fifteen percent cream, one right after the other. Send the waitbot out with a cup, give it about five minutes and send it out again. Do that until I tell it to stop."
"Monsieur," she said, stress making it difficult for Trent to follow her words, "we have only three waitbots. If we do this we must assign a waitbot to do nothing but service your table, and this will affect the other patrons."
"Damn it," Jerry Jackson exploded, "what is this nonsense? Take the goddamn coffee in a cup. Are you here to talk business or what?"
Rain drops were striking Trent square in the face. The manager looked back and forth between the two of them in confusion. "You're sure?" Trent asked her.