“I’ve heard the name. He’s a troubleshooter.”

“What kind of trouble?”

The man squinted, though his eyes were little more than slits anyway so the change was minimal. “Same kind you seem to be in. Trouble where the cops and the politicians and all the clean channels don’t work right. The kind where the trouble goes away, and no one ever hears about how.”

“Morten does this himself?”

“Naw. He’s what you call a layson.”

“Layson?” Jonah paused. “Liaison?”

“Right. You got a problem, he goes and finds the right people to deal with it, they take care of it. He’s like, you know, insulation. A layer of protection.”

And he had an in to Victor Steiner-Davion, Jonah thought. Morten was looking like a more promising target every minute. The question was, who was he insulating?

Elena Ruiz’s Apartment, Santa Fe

Terra, Prefecture X

4 December 3134

Burton Horn turned to where Elena Ruiz lay half under the broken coffee table. The woman had curled herself up into a ball, with her face turned away from the violent scene that Horn had just created.

“It’s all right,” he said. “He won’t hurt you now.”

Slowly, Ruiz unfolded herself and focused on her surroundings. Her breath was fast and shaky, and the pupils of her eyes were dilated with fear; her voice quavered as she asked, “Are you sure?”

Horn bent over Delgado’s motionless form. The man still lay sprawled on the floor where Horn had left him, but his labored breathing had ceased. A quick touch of fingers against the carotid artery told Horn that Delgado’s pulse had stopped as well. Horn straightened and turned back to Elena Ruiz.

“I’m sure,” he said. “I’ll call the police in a moment—they may be able to tell us more about who this man was. But if you feel up to talking, there are a few things I’d like to ask you first.”

She blinked, slowly. He could see the shock of the sudden attack giving way to gratitude toward her rescuer. The awkward fact of Delgado’s body a few meters away had not yet fully entered her awareness. If she was going to open up to his questioning, it would be now.

“If you think it would do any good—” she said.

“It would be a very great help,” he told her.

He assisted her to her feet and cleared a place for her on the couch. When she was settled, he sat down next to her. “But first—is there anything you would like to know?”

She glanced quickly at Delgado, sidelong, and away again. “Him,” she said. “Who was he? And why did—?”

“I believe somebody thought you might be in a position to reveal something,” Horn said gravely, “and they grew nervous enough to take active measures.”

“I don’t understand. I’m just a nurse-housekeeper. I don’t know anything important enough to tell.”

Horn could tell Elena Ruiz desperately wanted to believe her own statement, but couldn’t. Her conscience was not entirely clear. She either knew something or feared she knew something.

Horn decided to make giving up the knowledge easier for her by supplying a fig leaf to cover up the possibly unflattering truth. He said, “It’s always possible that you may not be aware of what you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Memory is a tricky thing,” he said. “You were in and out of the late Paladin’s private office almost every day. Not even his friends and allies would have been in his presence as often as you were.”

Ruiz nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. That’s true.”

“You may not be aware of it—if the story made the newsfeeds before his death, it would only have been a line or two at the most—but Victor Steiner-Davion was supposed to have given the opening address to the Electoral Conclave in Geneva.”

“Oh, yes.” Her expression was brighter now, and her complexion was regaining its normal color. “We all knew about it, here in Santa Fe. He was going to give it from the Knights’ headquarters complex over a tri-vid hookup, because of his health.”

“You see?” Horn told her. “That’s something you know because he lived here, and because you knew him.”

“Everybody knew about the speech, though,” she said.

“But they didn’t know its subject. The Paladin was keeping very quiet about that. Even his closest friends don’t know what he was planning to say.”

“If they don’t know it, what makes you think I do?” She sounded slightly belligerent now.

“You spoke with him every day,” Horn said. “You had free entry to his private rooms. Even if the two of you never talked politics, you had plenty of chances for an accidental glimpse of what he was working on—papers on his desktop, pictures on his data monitor, that sort of thing.”

He paused for a moment, giving Ruiz time to grasp the full meaning of what he was saying, and then went on. “Even if you know nothing, somebody out there thinks differently. Tell me what you do know, and I’ll see what I can do to get you away from Santa Fe and out of the line of fire.”

“All right.” Her tone now was one of grudging gratitude. “I didn’t get a chance to look all that often—I’m not a snoop—but a couple of times I did see something.”

He made an encouraging noise, careful not to startle her now that the information tap was flowing. She continued.

“He had names,” she said. “Lists of names. He’d printed them out from his data terminal, and he had them all marked up in colored pens, connecting them with lines. Sometimes he wrote numbers next to the names, and sometimes not.”

“Ah.” Horn felt the hairs lift on the back of his neck, and knew that he was on the track of something important. “Do you remember any of the names?”

Counterinsurgency Task Force

Temporary Headquarters, Geneva

Terra, Prefecture X

6 December 3134

“And there’s the Fallen Phantoms just south of the city.”

“Fallen Phantoms? Are you sure they’re not just a street gang?”

Duncan shrugged. “They may be. But they’re making a lot of noise, and the citizenry is getting nervous.”

Heather rolled her eyes. She’d like to just ignore this group, but she’d already had two other messages today giving her the same information as Duncan. “All right. If the police want militia backup, they can have it. But they’re being spread awfully thin.”

Duncan nodded. Heather’s noteputer beeped, but her finger was already poised to turn it off. The screen faded before she caught even a glimpse of the new message’s subject.

No longer confined to her relatively small office, Heather strode down the hallway of her new headquarters. She had six rooms attached to this hallway in addition to her own new command room, and each was filled with staffers trying to keep a lid on Terra until the election. The rooms were windowless and gray, giving her suddenly expanded staff nothing to look at besides their work.

She walked into a large room dominated by a gray oval table. Eight staffers awaited her arrival.

She walked to her chair at the table’s head but didn’t bother to sit. Pressing a button beneath the table, she made the words “Kittery Renaissance,” written in large letters, appear on the wall behind her. She waited for a brief murmur to pass.

“They’re back,” Heather said. “And whatever it is they’ve been working toward seems to be coming to a head this time. The rest of my staff, with the help of the Geneva police and the local militia, is working to keep a handle on the hundreds of other groups out there agitating. Our job is to contain this one.”

The questions came in a flurry. “How do we know they’re back? What do they want? What are they planning? What kind of measures can we take against them?”