CHAPTER 13
It took some looking, but Mtali does have some neat stuff. I found my first item at a collectible bookstore, and it’s a good thing I can read Arabic. It was a printed book, from Earth, on historical blades, published in the Pan Arabian States a hundred years earlier. I found several likely items.
I perused a bazaar for a local hour, asked a few questions, went to a little stall a few streets over, then into a dark, musty cellar, which had me rather disturbed, seeing as the last time I was here it was to kill people. An enclosed space with me surrounded by this group was not good for my mental well-being.
I had four locals in close proximity, and I was obviously an offworlder. I wasn’t comfortable, but I tried to control it, while being polite through tea made with water of questionable potability. I hoped it was fully boiled. The hassocks were dusty and worn, but thick enough.
However, this craftsman did have lovely local jambiya and a small, curved beltknife. He did work in gold and Mtali lapis and horn for the handles and sheaths.
I brought out the book and showed him a page.
“I want one of those, as exactly as you can make it, aged to be two centuries old.”
He accepted the book and squinted.
“I can make one like new,” he said.
“I don’t want new. I want it to look old, for my collection.”
“I can do that,” he said. “That will cost extra.”
“Of course. I also don’t want anyone to know it’s not original. I have a style to maintain.”
“I need a month,” he said.
“I have to leave in a week. I don’t mind paying.”
What I asked for would take more tools than I saw here, but a skilled craftsman can make things move. He probably had modern tools elsewhere, and it couldn’t be the first time someone had asked him to make a fake.
My main concern was proper alloy, though I didn’t want to come out and say so. I was an art collector, not a crook. However, he’d probably get it right, and the deception didn’t have to last long, if all went well.
Silver got out and around, too. With a change of styles and her skin tones, she could pass as Turkic or Asian in ancestry at a reasonable distance or with a scarf. She drove sometimes, rode and walked others, and managed to bring in video of the blast area. Then she had to analyze it.
When I got back to the apartment, Silver was in the middle of a call. I walked in, she held up a hand, I paused.
“I don’t mind if it hasn’t been displayed,” she said. “Can you describe it? Yes? Oh, that sounds precious. Is it a royal blue? Dark and rich? Yes, I know the pattern you mean. That’s woven in? Oh, yes. Can you give me video? There we go. Yes, I’m sure that’s what I want. Please send it at once.”
She offered a receiving address that wasn’t our residence, and arranged payment through an escrow house. Once done she closed camera and turned to me.
“I found a beautiful display case for a dagger. How big is the piece?”
“Thirty-five centimeters.”
“Perfect, this is forty.”
“Can you tag them all?”
“Easily. They should withstand most scans.”
“Excellent. Do we have more video for this morning?”
“Some. I went to the library and used a public download.”
“Good.”
She brought up files and I leaned back on the bed, screen across my knees and studied.
Ideally, I wanted a close-up, high-res pic of the blast area, running video from two angles with a time count, and super-slow frame rate in several spectra. What I had were news feeds with buried adlinks and a horrific angle with a lot of shake. Only two cameras had been nearby, only one pointing in the right direction.
I didn’t get much from it, but it was definitely the construction zone I’d passed twice and I could now see the blended edges over the millimeters-thick charge, which he’d even filled with tumbled stone and rolled out. He’d lost some effectiveness, but gained amazing concealment and the blast was disrupted just enough to roll and twist the vehicle instead of blowing it straight up. I couldn’t tell if that was intentional, and I hoped it wasn’t. If so, it was very sophisticated. I was betting on luck, but only because there was no reason for it not to be so. It could have been a failure with a little more disruption. The car was tough.
The car was so tough that even in three pieces, the passenger compartment was largely intact, though Secretary Shandari had lost a leg in the blast and taken frag in the torso. He’d been dead in seconds. However, a few centimeters difference and he might have survived intact.
Sloppy, Kimbo. He’d only had abbreviated demolition training, and specialty improv for mass destruction and disruption. I’d learned how to do anything from crack a window frame without breaking the sheet, disable ships, kill engines on moving vehicles without harming the occupants, and toss debris in a divided cone around a safe zone.