The report couldn't answer that question. It did tell me a lot, though. The woman with Cochenour was named Dorotha Keefer. She had been traveling with him for a couple of years now, according to their passports, though this was their first time off Earth. There was no indication of a marriage between them-or of any intention of it, at least on Cochenour's part. Keefer was in her early twenties-real age, not simulated by drugs and transplants. While Cochenour himself was well over ninety.
He did not, of course, look anywhere near that. I'd watched him walk over to their table, and he moved lightly and easily, for a big man. His money came from land and petro-foods. According to the synoptic on him, he had been one of the first oil millionaires to switch over from selling oil as fuel for cars to oil as a raw material for food production, growing algae in the crude oil that came out of his well and selling the algae, in processed form, for human consumption. So then he had stopped being a mere millionaire and turned into something much bigger.
That accounted for the way he looked. He had been living on Full Medical, with extras. The report said that his heart was titanium and plastic. His lungs had been transplanted from a twentyyear-old killed in a copter crash. His skin, muscles, and fats-not to mention his various glandular systems-were sustained by hormones
and cell-builders at what had to be a cost of several thousand dollars a day.
To judge by the way he stroked the thigh of the girl next to him, he was getting his money's worth. He looked and acted no more than forty, at most-except perhaps for the look of his pale-blue, diamond-bright, weary, and disillusioned eyes.
He was, in short, a lovely mark.
I couldn't afford to let him get away. I swallowed the rest of the drink and nodded to the Third of Vastra for another. There had to be some way, somehow, to land him for a charter of my airbody.
All I had to do was find it.
