George fidgeted with his rings and the camera viewpoint slewed dizzyingly around the room. The scene behind the ambassador’s desk was a mess. Blood had gouted from the wound in his back and splattered across his chair, pooling in viscid puddles beneath his desk. Footprints congealed in the rich carpet, an obscene trail leading toward the door.

“I take it this is important to our mission,” said Rachel. “Do we have a full crime scene report? Was the killer apprehended?”

“No and no,” Cho said with gloomy satisfaction. “The Office of the Vizier of Morning took control of the investigation outside the embassy, and while the Turku authorities have been polite and helpful to us, they have declined to give us full details of the killing, other than this diorama shot. Note, if you will, the theatrical red nose and bushy moustache a party or parties unknown applied to the Ambassador’s face — after he was dead, according to the Vizier’s Office. Oh, in case you were wondering, the killer wasn’t apprehended. For the sake of face the Vizier’s Office rounded up a couple of petty thieves, forced them to confess, then beheaded them in front of the public newsfeeds, but our confidential sources assure us that the real investigation is still continuing. Which brings me to incident number two.”

Another wall-sized photograph of chaos. This time it was a roadside disaster — the wreckage of a large vehicle, obviously some sort of luxury people mover, lay scattered across a road, uniformed emergency crews and rescue vehicles all around it. Blue sheets covered misshapen mounds to either side. Much of the debris was scorched; some of it was still smoking.

“This was an embassy limousine, taking her excellency Simonette Black to a conference on resettlement policy for refugee populations in Bonn, the capital of the Frisian Foundation, a confederation of independent states on Eiger’s World. Which, unlike al-Turku, is a Deutsch McWorld with no real history of political violence other than a couple of wars fought over oil fields and states’ rights a century or two ago.”

George pointed at some bushes to one side of the road, and the screen obligingly zoomed. Something gleamed: “That is a reflector post for an infrared beam. If we look at the source” — the viewpoint flipped dizzyingly into the sky then back down, 180 degrees away from the post — “we find this.” A green box, with a round hole in its front, above a complex optical sight and some kind of rubber mat. The box, too, looked scorched. “I’m told that’s a disposable anti-armor missile launcher, hypervelocity, with a two-stage penetrator jet designed to punch through ceramic armor or high-Tesla fields. The poor people in the limousine — Black, her wife, their driver, the charge d’immigration, and two bodyguards — didn’t stand a chance. It was stolen from an army depot one week before the incident. It was armed by remote control and rigged to fire when the beam was interrupted. I’m told that the plastic object underneath the missile launcher is an, ah, whoopee cushion. A rubber bladder that emits a flatulent sound when sat upon.”

Rachel looked down at her pad. To her surprise, she realized she’d begun to doodle on it with her stylus in ink transfer mode. Pictures of mushroom clouds and Mach waves knocking over groundscrapers and arcologies. She glanced up. “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,” she said. “Any more?”

George’s shoulders fell. He looked very old for a moment, even though Rachel knew he was seven years her junior. “Yes,” he said. Another diorama filled the wall. “I’ve been saving this until last. This is the Honorable Maureen Davis, ambassador to the United Nations of Earth in Geneva.” Gail looked away, visibly upset, and Rachel wondered distantly if she was going to cry. Violent death didn’t just strip the victims of their dignity, it insulted the survivors. And it was a personal insult to Rachel. We were supposed to protect her! An attack on a visiting diplomat reflected on the honor of the nation or coalition that played host to them. And this -

“Did we let this happen on our watch?” she demanded angrily. “After knowing that two other ambassadors had died in questionable circumstances?” She closed the dossier in front of her and flattened it against the table, pressing until her knuckles turned white.

“No.” George took a deep breath. “She was the first to die — just the last for us to be aware of. At first we penciled it in as a simple murder — horrible, but not special. Unlike the other two incidents we have a complete crime scene breakdown and we’re pursuing the murderer with every resource at our disposal. We are” — he took another breath — “appalled and outraged that this has happened. But more than that, we’re very much afraid that it’s going to happen again. Tranh, could you explain?”

Tranh stood up again and began to recite in a flat monotone that suggested that he, too, was trying to hold down the lid on his outrage. “Ambassador Davis was discovered in the state you see by a housekeeper maintenance contractor who called to deal with a fault alert by the house cleaning ’bot. The amah was confused by, well, a conflict between its recognizer for human beings and its garbage collection monitor. That doesn’t happen very often these days, but Ambassador Davis had an antique that still had a heuristic support contract in force. Embassy security admitted the maintenance contractor and immediately discovered the ambassador in this state. They immediately requested our assistance — unlike their counterparts on Turku.” His voice quivered with outrage as he added, “The killer used a bungee cord for a ligature.”

Foul play? That’s one way of putting it, Rachel observed. Ambassadors did not, as a rule, hang themselves in the stairwell of their own residences using rubberized ropes. Nor did they do so after pinioning their hands behind them, not to mention fracturing the backs of their skulls on mysteriously missing blunt objects.

“Ah yes, she shot herself three times in the back of the head and jumped out of the sixth floor window just to make us look bad,” she muttered, drawing a wide-eyed look of confusion from Gail. “When did this happen relative to the others? In the empire time defined by the Moscow embassy causal channels, if you’ve got the figures. That might tell us something.”

“The order was” — George flipped pages in a separate file — “Ambassador Davis at datum zero, followed by Simonette Black at T plus fourteen days, six hours, three minutes. Then Ambassador Pendelton thirty-four days, nineteen hours and fifty-two minutes later.” He gazed at Rachel tiredly. “Any other questions?”

“Yes.” She leaned back in her chair, tapping her stylus on the cover of her briefing file. “Are Turku and the, uh, Frisian Foundation coordinating their investigations? Are they even aware of the other assassinations?”

“No and no.” George inclined his head slightly. “You have more questions. Let’s hear them, and your reasoning.”

“All right.” Rachel sat up straight and looked at Gail. “You might not want to hear this.”

“I can take it.” She looked back, angry and bewildered. “I don’t have to like it.”

“Okay.” Rachel tapped the file in front of her. “As the man said, once is happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but three times is enemy action. We have a very nasty situation evolving, in which there exists a dwindling pool of assets — ambassadors — such that if the total drops below three, 800 million people will die. From an initial nine survivors, three have been murdered in the past three months. I assume the rest are under heavy guard—”

“Wherever possible,” George murmured.

“—But we basically have a crisis on our hands. Someone has figured out how to kill 800 million birds with just six stones. Leaving aside the killer’s evident penchant for cruel practical jokes, we know absolutely nothing about who they are and what motivates them. In fact, what we appear to know may actually be deliberate deception. And we’re the only people who are treating these assassinations as part of a big picture, rather than isolated killings.”