“I’d love to, except I don’t have any staff to spare. We may not be voting in this election, but the Senate is still quite busy.”

“I understand. Actually, I wasn’t going to ask for one of your people. I just wanted you to tell me your impressions of a diplomat I was thinking of bringing in. A young man named Henrik Morten.”

Leeson smiled quizzically. “I’m afraid I don’t know the gentleman.”

“Henrik Morten? Of Mallory’s World? Seems to be just about everywhere lately.”

“Not here.”

Jonah tried to prevent his jaw from clenching visibly. Leeson was lying. A few of his sources told him that Morten, claiming to be on a fact-finding mission from Senator Leeson, had directed a team to explore the ruins of the Yori MechWorks. Whatever “facts” had been found on that mission had never been released to the public.

Jonah trod carefully. “No, no, not here. On Al Na’ir. He gathered some information for you on the Yori MechWorks?”

Leeson grinned. “What information? The place is a wreck. I don’t need to send someone floating around an asteroid to tell me that.”

“You never sent Morten to Al Na’ir?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Senator, but some of my sources, people I trust a great deal, say he was working for you, armed with full credentials.”

“They are mistaken.” Leeson said that with a note in her voice Jonah had never heard from her. The warmth, the sociability, had disappeared. The friendliest politician he had ever known spoke to him with ice in her tone.

“But, Senator…”

“Paladin Levin, you may sit there and call me a liar while I, in turn, call your sources liars, but I can think of a thousand more productive ways to spend my night. If that’s all…”

No, Jonah thought, that’s far from all. The rest, though, will have to wait. “Thank you for your time, Senator,” he said.

Elena Ruiz’s Apartment, Santa Fe

Terra, Prefecture X

4 December 3134

If I’m going to be living in a hover vehicle, Burton Horn thought, I should rent a larger one. After all, Levin’s paying.

The passenger seat of his rental held a thermos of coffee and two pastries he’d picked up from a diner staffed by tired waitresses and grumpy cooks. In back were his noteputer and several handwritten notes he hadn’t gotten around to entering into it yet. On the floor was a blanket he used in the odd moment when he could grab some sleep.

He’d just tossed the noteputer back there after reviewing the latest dispatch from Levin, which confirmed that his instincts about Morten were right—and then some. He’d immediately called Elena Ruiz to ask if he could talk to her again, though he didn’t mention Morten’s name. She said he could come over right away.

Ruiz’s neighborhood didn’t look much better in broad daylight than it had at night. Most of the buildings were worn and dusty-looking. So were the people. The streets were clean, though, and he judged that he could park the rental vehicle in an unattended public lot without much fear of theft.

And Levin would cover the cost of a replacement, anyway.

He locked the car and walked the short distance from the lot to Elena Ruiz’s apartment. This time she didn’t inspect him through the security peephole for quite as long before letting him in. She looked somewhat less tired than before, giving Horn a fleeting glimpse of the attractiveness that—as much as her level of access to Victor Steiner-Davion—might have caught the eye of someone like Henrik Morten.

“Good morning,” she said. “I have coffee; would you like a cup?”

“I had some already, thank you.” He paused, and allowed a slightly embarrassed expression to cross his features. “In fact, if you could tell me where—”

“Oh. Yes.” Ruiz pointed. “It’s over there.”

“Thanks.”

Horn walked to the bathroom, locked the door and quietly slid the medicine cabinet open. He didn’t know what, if anything, he’d find that was useful in there, but experience told him more information was always better than less.

Somewhat to his disappointment, the cabinet shelves turned out to hold nothing of a betraying nature. Instead, he found an unexceptional collection of over-the-counter remedies for headache, stomachache and the common cold, a box of adhesive bandages, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a jar of lip balm and a tube of antibiotic cream. If Ruiz had a darker secret life, the evidence of it wasn’t here.

He closed the cabinet door and turned to go back out into the apartment’s main room—only to pause, his hand on the doorknob, at a noise from the room outside. The noise came again, a muffled knock, followed by low voices and the sound of the outside door opening.

The chance that he had been betrayed made him unlock the door as quietly as possible. The muffled click of the lock sounded loud in his ears. He swung the door toward him a fraction of an inch, so that the bolt no longer caught in the lock plate.

Then he heard a crash of breaking glass from the living room. The odds that Elena Ruiz had betrayed him, he thought, had just gone down.

Horn eased forward, slipping his single-shot slug pistol from its hiding place in his ankle holster.

Outside in the living-dining room, Ruiz screamed. The cry was followed by the sound of a slap, and of a body falling.

Horn pulled the door open and stepped through, swinging wide so that he could bring his weapon to bear. Single shot—just one chance. The little holdout pistol wasn’t a weapon for long-range shooting. He wished he’d brought his revolver.

He saw a man standing in the middle of the living-dining area, straddling Ruiz’s fallen body. The woman lay sprawled on the floor, her legs out of sight behind the broken coffee table. The man turned toward Horn. He had a laser pistol in his hand, he was bringing it up—

Horn fired. At the last moment he adjusted his point of aim from the center of the man’s body mass to the man’s head. Ruiz’s assailant might be wearing an armored vest under his baggy sweatshirt, and the little pistol didn’t have the knock-down power that a Gauss or a laser weapon packed.

The change of aiming point caused Horn to miss the greater part of his target. Instead of going down with his head in ruins, the man slapped his hand to the side of his face and howled, “You shot my ear off! You shot my goddamned ear off!”

Bright red blood poured out from between the man’s fingers. It would be only a moment, though, before he remembered that he had a pistol.

Horn threw the holdout pistol at the stranger’s face. Instinctively, the man ducked. In that moment Horn was on him, taking the man on the side of his knee with a reaping side kick and knocking him to the floor on top of Elena Ruiz.

The man began to push himself up on his hands. Horn stamped down heavily on the stranger’s back above his right kidney. The man cried out in pain and went down. He hadn’t been wearing an armored vest after all.

Horn reached down, grabbed the man’s shirt, and pulled him off Elena Ruiz. He rolled the man over onto his back and stepped down hard on one of his wrists.

“Who are you?” Horn demanded.

The man glared up at him. “I’m nobody.”

“You can do better than that.” Horn put his weight on the man’s wrist, and ground in his heel a bit. “Listen. You’re already dead. If you answer my questions I’ll make it quick. Otherwise…” He stepped down hard on the wrist again. The man moaned. “Now—who are you?”

“Delgado,” the man said. “Tony Delgado.”

“Good start, Tony,” Horn said. “Who hired you?”

“Some guy,” Delgado said.

Horn started to press down his heel again.

Delgado gasped. “I swear, he never said his name! He offered me two hundred stones to come mess with this lady, that’s all.”