Horn looked thoughtful. “The source of the initial security leak is probably the best place to start.”

“You know best how to do your work,” said Levin. “Meanwhile, I’ll be taking the other end. There’s a lot of people who stood to benefit from Victor’s death, and I’m afraid some of them are my colleagues.”

“Anyone particular you’ll be looking at first?”

Jonah sighed. “I don’t want to suspect any of them. But if I look at who benefited the most, there’re Kessel and Sorenson. They were the core of a bloc most likely to oppose whatever it was Victor was going to say. Their bloc just got more powerful. And there’s Tyrina Drummond. I don’t think she’d ever be involved in something as underhanded as an assassination, but there was no love lost between her and Victor. I’ll at least need to speak with her.”

Horn nodded. “What about the guy who replaced Victor?”

“Gareth Sinclair?”

“Right. Didn’t he benefit the most from Victor’s death in the short run?”

Jonah didn’t hesitate. “I suppose. But he’d have no way of knowing he’d be Victor’s replacement. And besides, I know Sinclair. He’s as decent as they come.” He shook his head. “Sinclair’s the last person I’d suspect.”

Elena Ruiz’s Apartment, Santa Fe

Terra, Prefecture X

29 November 3134

Santa Fe in November was warmer than Geneva, but a chill still held the night. The air was warm and dry, and smelled of desert vegetation.

Upon his arrival, Burton Horn had secured accommodations for himself in a budget-priced hotel. Once settled, he took advantage of his first opportunity for a long, private look at the file on Victor Steiner-Davion’s death. The file’s contents were detailed: witness statements; an autopsy report; a report on the crime scene by the responding officers of Santa Fe law enforcement; more witness statements and another report on the crime scene, this time from representatives of the Knights of the Sphere. Horn sat in the hotel room’s comfortable if somewhat worn armchair, with a tumbler of iced spring water close at hand, and worked his way through the pages while the tri-vid set flickered in the background, its sound turned off.

According to the medical report, Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion had died of a sudden, massive heart attack. The report, Horn conceded, might be telling part of the truth. All sorts of things could bring on such a fatal attack, including putting up active resistance to a murder attempt.

Local law enforcement officers, in their account of the crime scene, had reported the presence in Steiner-Davion’s rooms of a broken crystal liquor decanter and a similarly broken tumbler. Both decanter and tumbler could have shattered by accident when the Paladin collapsed, but the local law wasn’t buying that explanation. Not when the decanter had been smashed in a way that turned it into a sharp-edged weapon—and not when the blood that stained those edges belonged to someone other than Victor Steiner-Davion.

Reading between the lines of the account, Horn experienced a wave of new respect for the old man. In spite of his age and ill health, the Paladin hadn’t gone down quietly. He had wounded at least one of his assailants. He’d marked a trail.

Santa Fe law enforcement was already involved in the search for the perpetrators of the crime; Horn intended to leave them to it. A DNA analysis of the bloodstains would give them a trail to follow, a trail that would, in the fullness of time, yield the identity of the killer. Once that was known, there would be warrants issued and communiqués sent out and contact made with law enforcement agencies on other worlds, whereupon the object of their search would have to either resign himself to capture or abandon The Republic of the Sphere entirely. Such a search would be remorseless—the death of a public figure like Victor Steiner-Davion was not going to drop off of the law enforcement community’s monitor screens anytime soon—but it would be slow.

Furthermore, as Jonah Levin had pointed out to Horn in Geneva, the search would yield only tools. It was unlikely to produce the men or women who had put them to use. For Horn’s purposes, the crucial question was how the killers had penetrated the impressive security around the Knights’ Santa Fe headquarters. Either they’re made of smoke and air, he said to himself, or they had inside help—witting or, perhaps, unwitting.

Horn locked his files away in the hotel room’s jewelry safe and ventured out into the chilly, arid Santa Fe night to chat with the person who had seen and spoken with Victor Steiner-Davion the most often in the weeks just preceding his death; his nurse-housekeeper, Elena Ruiz.

Ruiz lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an unfashionable part of Santa Fe. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood—there were no deals in illicit substances being struck on the street corners under the lampposts, no uncollected trash bags or abandoned vehicles left out by the curb, no empty buildings with broken windows—but it was drab and unpromising just the same. After an interval during which she had obviously been checking him out through the security peephole, Ruiz opened the door to his knock.

“I’m Burton Horn,” he said, before she could tell him to go away. He unfolded his ID case, with its formidable array of authorizations, and held it up long enough for her to inspect it thoroughly. “I’m investigating the death of the late Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion at the request of Paladin Jonah Levin and of the Exarch. May I come in?”

“Sure.”

The woman sounded tired. She opened the door all the way and let Horn into her apartment. He sized it up at a glance. The living and dining areas were sparsely furnished but tidy, and Ruiz herself was a petite, dark-haired woman with a ready smile that was currently weighed down, disappearing almost immediately. Wearing a matted blue bathrobe and no makeup, she looked as if she had gone too long without sleep.

Ruiz gestured him to a place on the couch and took a seat herself in the overstuffed armchair next to it.

“I’ve already talked with the Santa Fe police,” she said. “And with my boss, and my boss’ boss, and a couple of Knights of the Sphere. If you’re working for one of the Paladins, you already know all this.”

“I do,” he said. “But if you don’t mind, I want to hear the story from you directly.”

“Story?”

“About what happened the night Victor Steiner-Davion died.”

She looked faintly puzzled, but attempted to answer the question just the same. “I didn’t find him—find his body, I mean—until I came in to work the next morning, and saw that he was…”

“I know,” he said, as soothingly as he could. “I’ve already been over the scene with the police. You don’t need to revisit it. Right now, I’m more interested in what may have happened in the apartment the night before.”

“I’ve already told the Santa Fe police that it wasn’t one of my nights on call,” she said.

She sounded a bit defensive on the subject, he thought, and wondered whether the police and the Knights between them had been making her feel guilty about having a personal life outside of her work. Aloud, he asked, “You were out, then?”

“Yes. With a friend.”

The slight pause and the bit of warmth in her voice suggested that the friendship was more than casual. Horn made a mental note of that and continued.

“I understand from the police report that as Paladin Steiner-Davion’s regular caregiver, you were able to monitor his status remotely?”

She nodded. “I can—I mean, I could—access his security status and his biometric telemetry through my personal datapad.”

“Which would give you—?”

“A condensed version of whatever the on-call staff would be seeing when they looked at the big monitors,” she said.