“So what are you in for?” Ferus asked.
Clive stretched out his legs. “I was lying low under one of your excellent false identities - thanks for never charging me, by the way - when I saw an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.”
“Don’t tell me. A little espionage? A tiny theft of an industrial secret?”
Clive grinned. “Something along those lines. The next thing I knew, I was being arrested. They threw me against a wall and put stun cuffs on me. They traced my ID does and somehow in a burst of their usual efficiency they discovered who I was. That was act three of this space opera, mate. Once they had my real name, they had me. Into the simmer I went. The End.”
But it wasn’t the end. Ferus knew enough about Clive to know that. He’d met Flax in the time before the Clone Wars, when he was still operating his business, Olin/Lands. He and his partner Roan offered their services to whistleblowers, beings who exposed corruption and then found the law did not protect them. Roan and Ferus created new identities for the whistleblowers and their families and also offered protection while they established themselves on new worlds. Clive hadn’t needed their protection -he had honed his own style of defense, with amazing skills Ferus had never seen outside of the Temple.
Using his abilities as a musician, he had often gone unnoticed in bars or parties while he was gathering information or stealing it. It was a living, he would say with a shrug. Once the Clone Wars started, he saw his skills as marketable. Ferus had thought of him immediately after he had been put in charge of an operation on the planet of Jabor. He had recruited Clive and sent him undercover to a Separatist base to work as a double agent. As a result, Ferus had been able to bust a Separatist spy ring that had operated throughout the Mid-Rim. It hadn’t won the war, but it had saved lives.
If there was anybody in the galaxy who he’d want to watch his back - with the exception of Roan or Obi-Wan - it was Clive Flax.
“So what’s the plan?” Ferus asked.
“What plan?”
“The escape plan. I know you have one.”
“You’re right,” Clive admitted easily. “I just need an accomplice. The galaxy smiled on me the day I saw your ugly mug in here. That’s why I kept you alive.”
“You mean you only saved my life so you could use me?”
“Of course, mate. You know I only think about my own sweet self.” Clive grinned at him.
“Tell me the plan,” Ferus said. “I don’t care what it is - I’m in.”
“I’ve been stealing things for months,” Clive said. He reached inside his coveralls and laid out several items on the hard floor.
Ferus looked at them dubiously.
A servodriver.
A spoon.
A droid’s restraining bolt.
A handful of durasteel bits.
“This is what you’re going to break out of prison with?”
Clive picked up one of the tiny bits. “You see this? You put a small object in a piece of equipment in the right way, you can disable it. Disable something, you’ve got a distraction. Sometimes that’s all you need.” He replaced the scrap of metal with something like fondness. “Besides, I had a plastoid datacard, too, but I had to use it to save your sorry neck. The transport ship comes tomorrow for the new load. Are you in or out?”
Ferus gave another glance at the motley group of objects. Sure, they didn’t look like much. But Clive had just saved his life with a datacard.
“I’m in,” he said.
CHAPTER NINE
Malorum sat in the cockpit of his private starship on one of the landing platforms of Polis Massa.
There were too many unrelated facts in his brain. He was used to cataloging facts and swiftly reaching conclusions - that’s how smart he was - but now he felt only confusion. He hated confusion.
Think, he told himself impatiently.
He suspected that Senator Amidala had been treated here, but he could not locate any evidence of it.
One of his best agents, Sancor, had been killed here. According to the operational head of the medcenter, Maneeli Tuun, Sancor had “accidentally” fallen off an observation platform and landed on some lethally sharp surgical instruments.
Accident. Did they take him for a fool?
A source had told him that a Jedi had been the one to take Amidala’s body to Naboo. Of course the galaxy believed the Jedi had killed Amidala, but Malorum knew it was a lie fabricated to slur the Jedi. He didn’t care about that. He cared only about what really happened, because it was information Darth Vader did not have. And any information Vader didn’t have could be used against him.
The funeral …
Malorum tapped his fingers against the cockpit instrument panel. The funeral had been organized in haste. For such a ceremonial people, it was perhaps too hasty.