"Who the hell is the boss?"
"Maybe he'll tell you when he sees you," the other said, patiently and
reasonably.
"Well, go tell the boss he can go to the ..."
The second of the two had been standing silently, his hands in his
great-coat pockets. Now he brought his left hand out and placed a bill
before Don Mathers. "The boss said to give you this."
It was a thousand-unit note. Don Mathers had never seen a bill of that
denomination before, nor one of half that.
He pursed his lips, picked it up and looked at it carefully.
Counterfeiting was a long lost art. It didn't even occur to him that it
might be false.
"All right," Don said, coming to his feet. "Let's go see the boss, I
haven't anything else to do and his calling card intrigues me."
At the curb, one of them summoned a cruising cab with his wrist screen
and the three of them climbed into it. The one who had given Don the
large denomination bill dialed the address and they settled back.
"So what does the boss want with me?" Don said.
They didn't bother to answer.
The Interplanetary Lines building was evidently their destination. The
car whisked them up to the penthouse which topped it, and they landed on
the terrace.
Seated in beach chairs, an autobar between them, were two men. They were
both in their middle years. The impossibly corpulent one, Don Mathers
vaguely recognized. From a newscast? From a magazine article? The other
could have passed for a video stereotype villain, complete to the
built-in sneer. Few men, in actuality, either look like or sound like
the conventionalized villain. This was an exception, Don decided.
He scowled at them. "I suppose one of you is the boss," he said.
"That's right," the fat one grunted. He looked at Don's two escorts.
"Scotty, you and Rogers take off."
They got back into the car and left.
The vicious-faced one said, "This is Mr. Lawrence Demming. I am his
secretary."
Demming puffed, "Sit down, Lieutenant. What'll you have to drink? My
secretary's name is Rostoff. Max Rostoff. Now we all know each other's
names. That is, assuming you're Sub-lieutenant Donal Mathers."