Warworld: The Lidless Eye Read Online Free Page B

secrets slip out—for years with a man who secretly hated and despised him. He pushed his chair back and rose, to stand with his feet wide apart and his hands clenched into fists. “Steele, get the Hell out of here before I turn you inside out and hang you out to dry! And don’t ever come within five meters of this table again. You’re no friend of mine, or anybody else at this table.”
    Whakley nodded, but Morgan rose up: “You’ve got that wrong, Hamilton. Steele is a good friend and business partner. You’re going to live to regret this insult.”
    “You two have made a big mistake,” Steele said with a snarl. “You’ll live to regret this; I promise you.” He strode out of Dupars with Morgan in tow, and the eye of everyone in the dining room.
    Haverstill, shaking his head, made his way over to their table. “You two have just made yourselves a bad enemy. Steele hates to be embarrassed and you’ve done that in spades.”
    “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Hamilton said. “I’d like to buy around of drinks for the house.”
    That cheered the room up, but Haverstill left shaking his head.
    Whakley called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of Tabletop bourbon, probably the last one in the house since no one knew when another trading ship would arrive in-system. “A toast,” he offered. “To friends and good companions.”
    The bourbon went down smooth, but it didn’t take the chill out of John Hamilton’s blood, nor make him forget Steele’s parting glare. He opened his belt pouch, taking out five hundred crowns. He handed them to Whakley, saying, “I’ll have the rest for you next dimday.”
    “Christ, John…I don’t know how to thank you. I really don’t…”
    “Then don’t try. I know how much that factory means to you; I’m just glad I could help. Now, I have to go and tell the Baron what just happened.”
    “You don’t think he’ll be mad—?
    Hamilton shook his head, knowing that he’d made the right decision. His grandfather would have done the same thing.
    Whakley held the bottle up and asked, “Another drink before you leave?”
    “No, thanks. I want to get to the market while there’s something left to buy. I’ll see you soon.”
II
    David Steele sat at his desk, slamming things down. He picked up a crystal vase that had once adorned an Earth home and smashed it into the wall. I’ll kill them all, the entire Hamilton family , he fumed.
    There was a timid knock at his door.
    “Come in!” he shouted.
    His personal assistant, Emil Proxmyer, came rushing into the office. He was a little man with wet eyes, a round face and his sparse brown hair styled in a bad comb-over.
    “What is it, sir?”
    “Pour me a glass of my best New Aberdeen Scotch.”
    The small man scampered over to the large bar and filled a thick tumbler with his favorite single-malt Scotch. Behind Proxmyer’s meek and ingratiating manner, rested an encyclopedic memory, a finely-honed legal mind and an easily fanned resentment against anyone taller, richer or more handsome—which included just about every male inhabitant of Castell City.
    “Tell me everything you know about the Hamiltons,” Steele demanded.
    Proxmyer’s gray eyes darted up into his head and he seemed to go into some sort of trance. Steele was used to his assistant’s peculiar tics and mannerisms and waited impatiently for his response.
    “The Hamiltons are one of Haven’s oldest families. Edwin Albert Hamilton was originally born in Alberta, Canada. Records about his early days are sketchy but he attended Mount Royal University in Calgary, but left—due to gambling charges—without obtaining an undergraduate degree in geology. After three years at the university, it appears he worked at a number of itinerant jobs, including that of a prospector. He was busted in Alberta for fraudulent sales of mining stocks to abandoned mines that had been salted to gullible investors. He quickly migrated to the United States where he used his