The outer door to his apartment clicked open. No light followed the sound; the hall outside was also dark. No power there either, Victor thought. Whoever had entered would have had to use the emergency key—and yet, no alarm had sounded.

Somebody was in the outer room, moving with deliberate quiet.

This, thought Victor, was not good. He pushed his chair away from the table so that he could stand unimpeded. He marked where faint beams of light from outside penetrated the windows, making the shadows of the room even deeper by contrast. He knew where the intruder would have to walk to reach him. The intruder would have night-vision goggles, while Victor would have his knowledge of the room’s furnishings to guide him.

All the instincts honed by a lifetime spent in war and politics were sounding an alarm even louder than the one that should have been shrilling throughout the entire headquarters complex. Victor had understood as soon as the door had opened that they wanted him dead.

He didn’t have much doubt as to who “they” were. He’d outlived or made peace with all of his old enemies—except, of course, his sister, but if she came after him she wouldn’t strike in the dark. She’d want to be sure to see his face.

Anybody else left from his youth or his middle age who might harbor a lingering grievance against him had stopped trying to act on it years before. This was a new quarrel, and he’d only done one thing lately that might account for it.

In the dark, he smiled a little. If he’d wanted a final proof that the structure of ideas he’d built up so laboriously was solid, he had it now. Somebody intended to kill him over it.

They would succeed. He had no illusions about that. He was an old man, older than he’d ever expected to be, older perhaps than he’d ever had a right to expect, and the person moving quietly through the darkened outer room would be without doubt a professional in the prime of life. That person would kill him, and would destroy his work.

Moving in silence, he reached out and grasped the empty whisky glass. His other hand found the decanter. He stood, the glass in his left hand, the bottle in his right, and stepped away from the desk. He backed to the wall and allowed the bottle to hang from his fingertips. Then he swung it backward, so that the bottom rim struck the wall. The glass shattered away from the point of impact, leaving him with a jagged dagger below the bottle’s neck. The noise of its shattering was as loud as blasphemy in the deadly silence. The scent of alcohol surrounded him.

He had a weapon now. Not enough to save his life, or even to take his assailant down with him. But enough, even in the hand of an old man, to mark the other, and mark the scene.

One of the beams of outside light flickered as a black-clad shape passed through it and stepped closer. Victor realized that the plan must be to make the agency of his death look like some natural cause or accident of fate—a heart attack, a pulmonary embolism, something that his doctors could shake their heads sadly about and say, “Well, he was an old man.” That would explain why the killer hadn’t already used a laser pistol or other projectile weapon. They must have expected him to be asleep, allowing them to slip in, do the job, and leave with as few traces as possible. They wouldn’t expect him to be awake, and they hopefully wouldn’t expect him to put up a fight. It was a small advantage, but at least it was something.

Considered in that light, Victor thought, his course of action was clear. If he could make it plain enough that his death had been not accident but murder, then all the rest would come out in time.

No point in waiting any longer. Victor threw the heavy crystal tumbler with a sidearm toss he’d learned nearly a century before on the grenade range, aiming for the intruder’s head. The man would duck, or, if luck ran wild, might even lose his goggles. And the low coffee table barely a foot away would hamper him, maybe even trip him, if he tried to sidestep.

Victor was no longer as quick on his feet as he had been even twenty years ago, but when fighting for his life, a man can do wonders. He was moving fast, forward, around his desk, toward the spot where his would-be assassin had yelled with surprise and fallen.

Victor shouted out a hoarse and wordless war cry of his own. A warrior dies bloody, he thought, and am I not a Paladin still? In the next breath he was on his opponent, clawing for the night-vision goggles with his left hand, stabbing downward with the broken bottle in his right.

Then strong arms seized him from behind, pressing a cloth over his face, and his heart sank. There had been two assassins, and not just one.

He kicked backward and felt his heel strike a shin. The second man’s grip loosened. He tried to twist, tried an elbow strike, but a pain bloomed in his chest, running up to his jaw and down his left arm. A pinched nerve, he thought. Cold sweat started on his forehead. He couldn’t breathe.

The cloth over his mouth and nose pressed harder. He felt like a ’Mech was standing on his chest. He stabbed backward with the neck of the broken decanter and felt a slight resistance. Then the pain overwhelmed him and he dropped the bottle. He heard nothing more. The pain grew, becoming worse than any he had ever felt, and he fell into blackness darker even than a lightless room in Santa Fe.

Elena Ruiz came to work in the morning with a cheerful heart. She’d had a good night last night; dinner with Henrik was always nice, but this had been one of their better evenings. The old Paladin had gone to sleep early, and her periodic remote checks on his health and welfare showed nothing on her pager but a darkened apartment, with all security and biometric systems reading green. She’d enjoyed a pleasant meal, for once free from concern about Victor Steiner-Davion’s habit of burning the midnight oil, and had slept soundly afterward.

Today was a clear, sunny morning, and the November air was dry and cold. Inside the building, Elena took a moment to hang up her jacket in the staff coatroom—the heat in the retirement wing was always kept higher than in the main part of building. From the coatroom, she made her way to Victor Steiner-Davion’s suite.

The door was locked—not surprising, since the old man was careful enough about such things to qualify as paranoid—so she had to open the outer door with her passkey. She put on her professional smile and cheerful voice.

“Paladin Steiner-Davion?” she said as she opened the door.

Elena wasn’t surprised when she failed to get an answer. She expected that the Paladin had fallen asleep at his desk again, as he so often did these days. She let the outer door swing shut behind her and moved on into the apartment, purposefully making no effort to be silent. The noise of her voice and her footsteps usually proved sufficient to wake him, if he happened to still be asleep after sunrise. This time, however, there was no response.

“Paladin Steiner-Davion?” she asked again. And then she found him.