“And you were in the habit of checking this information nightly, even when you were not officially on call?”

“Yes,” she said. “At about ten o’clock every evening. Sometimes I’d do a second check just before going to bed, but not always. He is—he was—an old man, and things can go bad in a hurry without warning sometimes.”

“Did you make a second check on the evening that Steiner-Davion was killed?”

“No.”

Again, he heard the fractional change in her tone of voice. Whatever she’d been doing the rest of the night, Horn thought, probably involved her “friend.”

“But everything was in order at the time of your ten o’clock check.”

“Yes. According to the readouts, Paladin Steiner-Davion had turned out all the lights and was sleeping soundly.”

“Interesting,” said Horn. His opinion of the hired assassin went up a notch; the killer or killers had spoofed both the on-call staff and Elena Ruiz’s unofficial long-distance monitoring. They couldn’t have found out about the latter by accident; somebody in the know must have tipped them off.

Aloud, he said, “So you had every reason to believe that all would be well until the next morning.”

She gave him a weak smile. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”

He made a brief show of reviewing his notes, then said, “All right. Thanks. You’ve been very helpful.”

“I wish I could see how,” she said forlornly.

Without any comfort to offer her, Horn rose and moved toward the door. Just inside the threshold, he paused, counting off the seconds in his head and watching her relax.

Then, as if an afterthought, he said, “Strictly for the record—could I have the name of the friend you had dinner with that evening?”

“Henrik Morten,” she said.

“Ah,” said Horn. “Thank you.”

Interesting, he said to himself as he headed back to his hotel. Henrik Morten.

With a first name like that, the man might be one of the Mallory’s World Mortens. If that were true, young Henrik definitely wasn’t the sort of person you’d expect to find keeping company with an old man’s nurse-housekeeper.

It was a loose end, and Burton Horn liked loose ends. If you pulled on them just right, things began to unravel.

Bank du Nord, Plateau de St. Georges Branch,

Geneva

Terra, Prefecture X

30 November 3134

The woman called Norah had come to Geneva in order to start trouble, and she was happy with her assignment. For entirely too long, as far as she was concerned, the Kittery Renaissance had been all about talk, with no action taken. She had almost stopped believing in the one big day that would push their man to the top.

The dream of that day was what had brought her into Cullen Roi’s orbit in the first place, and into the ranks of the Kittery Renaissance. She never spoke of her past—she had buried it along with her dead—but she had brought from it into the present a hunger for vengeance against the Capellan Confederation so fierce that nothing less than the might of the entire Republic of the Sphere was sufficient to carry it out. Only an Exarch could command such a vengeance, and only the right Exarch would command it, but the structure of Devlin Stone’s Republic left her with no voice in the selection of the next Exarch save through the Kittery Renaissance and the activities of Cullen Roi.

This little job by itself wouldn’t be enough to make the necessary changes, but it was a start. A promissory note from the Kittery Renaissance, a little taste now of the cup that would be hers to sup from in the fullness of time.

Mindful of Cullen Roi’s instructions, she had chosen her location carefully. She had avoided the heart of downtown Geneva, where The Republic of the Sphere had its government buildings, and where those in power had their exclusive hotels and residential apartments. That territory was set aside for later.

Nor had she gone into any of the city’s poorest and most dangerous precincts. Trouble happening there was barely noted elsewhere, unless it threatened to spill out and engulf the whole city. No. What she’d wanted—and what she had found—was a middle-class, middling-expensive part of the city, a neighborhood where trouble and conflict were rare enough that even a slight unpleasantness would be enough to make the news.

Trouble in this neighborhood would be taken seriously. The Bank du Nord had a large branch office on one corner, and the Unity Mercantile Corporation had its Genevan establishment on the corner diagonally opposite. The other two corners held a block of business offices, with a law firm taking up most of the bottom floor, and a municipal parking garage. The police station covering this precinct was several crowded blocks away—far enough that their response time would be slower than that of the roving tri-vid team from the local news channel, with a studio only one block over.

Norah derived a certain amount of pleasure from the fact that the place best suited to her goal had also turned out to be on the edge of Geneva’s largest Capellan enclave. As far as she was concerned, it didn’t matter that most of the Capellans living in Geneva were the sons and daughters of people who had occupied these few blocks for generations before Devlin Stone conceived of The Republic. The Republic should have rooted them out and sent them home years ago, she thought. Ten to one they’re only waiting for their chance to sell us out, just like those bastards on Liao. She had trusted the people of the Confederation before, during the past she no longer spoke of, and it had cost her everything she once held dear. I will never, she had vowed, make the mistake of trusting any of these people again. And now that she had the opportunity to sow chaos on some of their doorsteps—well, so much the better.

At half past noon Norah was in place, along with certain members of the Genevan cell of the Kittery Renaissance noted less for the subtlety of their political thought than for the hardness of their fists and the heaviness of their boots. They might have trouble following a line of philosophical argument, but they could follow orders, and—in matters like this, at any rate—they knew how to improvise.

Norah was wearing Capellan-style clothing for the occasion. Her appearance was not, in fact, particularly Capellan, but cultural identity these days was as much a matter of choice as of genetics. What counted was that anyone catching sight of her would see the clothes and think “Capellan” instead of looking closer.

Thus disguised, she waited.

A well-dressed young man stepped into the vestibule of the Bank du Nord, punched a few keys, scratched his temple idly, then left. He had all the appearances of an ordinary man passing through the neighborhood on an errand. In the light of what was to come, no one would remember him.

Henrik Morten had planned his route and activities carefully, right down to his bored nonchalance in the vestibule. It helped that he had actual business to transact—he’d recently come into possession of funds that were best transferred at a location other than his normal bank. Tomorrow, the funds would be transferred again as they made their tangled way to their final destination.

If his timing was right, he’d be just an innocent bystander to what was going to erupt any minute. He passed through the security barrier at the building’s front entrance and paused on the exterior steps to let his eyes adjust to the outside light.

An instant later the sun-dazzle cleared from his eyes, just in time for him to see a Capellan woman stumble and fall away from the crowd, into the path of an oncoming bus. He watched her, and the scene he knew she would cause, out of the corner of his eye.