"Jesus H. Christ," Hal growled between his teeth.

The madam bowed slightly. "Until later." She closed the door.

Hal spent a long moment staring at Avril as his breath grew hotter, then moved purposefully across the room.

* * *

To start with, it was a standard missing-person report. Gemma Tivon waited for three hours past the time her husband usually arrived home from the night shift before trying to open a link to his bracelet pearl to ask where he'd gotten to. There was no reply; the datapool communications management AS reported there wasn't even a standby link to his bracelet. It was switched off. He never did that Gemma called the spaceport and asked if Dudley was working some unexpected overtime. The department supervisor told her no, then got the security people to check the parking lot and the gate log. Dudley Tivon's car wasn't in the lot. The gate log showed he'd signed out at seven minutes to six that morning, slightly earlier than usual.

Because they were conscientious employees, the spaceport immediately called the police and sent someone around to Gemma Tivon. The police accessed the local traffic regulation AS and used its log to track Dudley's car after it left the spaceport. As usual, he'd driven along the main highway back to the city; then his routine changed. He'd turned onto Durrell's outer beltway and continued on eastbound for another three junctions. After that he'd taken a minor road, then turned off that for an unmonitored track leading through a forest. There was no record of the car coming out of the forest on any of the approach roads.

As the spaceport was pressing hard, the police sent a couple of patrol cars into the forest and dispatched a spotter helicopter. It took them two hours, but they eventually found Dudley's car under a big pine tree. The interior had been soaked with some inflammable liquid and set alight. A forensic team was immediately sent to the scene, along with three more cars.

The Zantiu-Braun AS that monitored all capital zone police activity tagged the case for attention anyway because of the strange circumstances. The Third Fleet intelligence agency AS also tagged it, but for a slightly different reason: Dudley Tivon was connected with spaceflight, and Gemma was collateral.

Five minutes after the patrol car officer informed her dispatcher they'd found the car and it had been deliberately set alight, the relevant case datapackage was delivered to Simon Roderick's DNI from his personal AS.

"A cold trail, unfortunately," he said as Quan and Raines arrived in his office. "Over four hours now since the car was abandoned and torched."

"We can divert some of our helicopters to the forest to help with the search," Quan suggested.

"No," Simon told him firmly. "We don't initiate anything. I don't want us to draw attention to our interest If the police want our assistance they can apply for it through the appropriate channels. In any case, simply finding poor old Tivon's body will prove little."

"Forensics might give us something."

"I doubt it. In fact I doubt we'll ever find the body. If our opponents have any sense, and as far as I'm concerned, they have plenty, the body won't even be in that forest. Besides, I'm not interested in how he died, only why."

"He'd delivered something to them and wasn't necessary anymore," Raines said. "Or he'd delivered something to the spaceport for them—a bomb, perhaps—and thought he was collecting his payoff."

"That's very crude for these people," Simon said. "In any case, you're overlooking his wife, Gemma. He isn't going to get involved in any venture that could jeopardize her. No, I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He glanced at the two intelligence operatives. "Run up a week's timeline profile for me. Access every sensor log in the data-pool, starting with last night and working backward from there. When you come back to me, I want to be able to watch his whole day, every single minute of it. And once you've done that, set up a secure link to the Koribu and correlate as much as you can from last night with skyscan."

It took them another five hours, but they were smiling when they returned to Simon's office. "We found it," Quan announced. He had the confident tone of every underling bringing good news to his boss. "Dudley was murdered, and that's only the start of it." His DNI routed the first set of files to the big wall-mounted pane opposite Simon's desk. A time-synchronized split image appeared. On the left was the recording from a camera overlooking the spaceplane parking apron. On the right was a skyscan picture of the same location.

Simon sat back in his seat watching as a man emerged from the bottom of the Xianti 5OO5's airstairs at the same time Dudley Tivon walked out of the maintenance hangar. On the left Dudley continued across the apron into another hangar. On the right, the two men confronted each other, and a second later Dudley was dead.

"I don't know how they did it," Braddock Raines said in admiration. "But there isn't a trace of software subversion anywhere in the spaceport's network. I even had one of our people go out there and physically pull the memory circuits for the cameras around the parking apron so we could go over them here. Nothing. So we know they can play that network like a maestro. Whatever they've got, it's damn impressive."

"Is that camera memory e-alpha protected?" Simon asked sharply.

"No, although it is protected by some excellent encryption. However, the backup memory in the AS is inside an e-alpha fortress," Raines said. "But we think that the subversion occurred at the camera itself, or at least its connection to the network. They had to have their own AS online to generate the false image in real-time. In itself, that's interesting. They subverted four cameras that we know of, and that takes up a lot of bandwidth. Our AS should have picked up that quantity of subversive dataflow within the spaceport network. The fact that it didn't is highly suggestive."

"You mean e-alpha is compromised?"

Raines screwed his face up, unwilling to make a commitment. "It is possible to do what they did without breaking through e-alpha forts. But it's difficult. Of course, so is subverting e-alpha. If they can't actually do that, their capability is close enough to make very little difference to us. The fact that their man got into the spaceplane is proof of that." He ran an earlier skyscan file, showing the intruder walking across the apron and straight into the airstair. "No record of any entry during the night," Raines commented as the figure approached the big delta-shaped spaceplane. "And there, see, when he arrives at the airstair he doesn't need to physically tamper with the security lock. The software's already been configured to admit him."

"You drew up a timeline for the intruder, of course," Simon said.

The two intelligence operatives swapped a mildly worried glance. "We tried. We couldn't even establish when he entered the maintenance hangar, let alone when he arrived at the spaceport. The only sensor data we can trust is from sky-scan, and that's too limited to build up any kind of detailed profile."