No one sat within three stools of him, leaving the drunk to twitch over his drink, his eyes scanning restlessly back and forth, up and down the bar.

It was a good disguise, Horn knew, but it made it tough to watch the whole club. He mainly tried to watch the door, catching a quick glimpse while he pretended to only be looking down.

The other trick of this role was drinking enough to be convincing while staying sober enough to do the job. Luckily, Horn had been rehearsing for that part of the role his whole life.

The job of keeping an eye on the door, though, suddenly became unimportant when the trio of young women entered. A blind man could have seen them. They appeared to be dressed in neon, with the brightest parts of their dresses hugging what they believed were their most flattering contours.

Horn had a different sort of radar than the rest of the club-goers, and his went off as soon as the young women entered. He saw them scan the floor, frown a little, and confer with each other through a series of half-hearted shrugs. They strolled the floor for a few minutes, let everyone take a good look at them, danced with a few guys so they’d have the satisfaction of rejecting them when the music stopped, then left.

No one noticed the mean drunk at the end of the bar leave. The three young women didn’t see him carefully trailing behind them.

They visited a second club, with much the same result as the first. In their third club of the night, though, their eyes lit up when they saw someone they recognized on the dance floor. A handsome man with smooth hair, nearly black eyes, a cleft chin and an aristocratic air.

Henrik Morten.

They greeted him enthusiastically, calling him “Vic” (a small deception that made Horn inexplicably angry), and he danced with each of them in turn.

Burton Horn the mean drunk had been replaced by Burton Horn the amiable newcomer. Top shirt button open, jacket over his shoulder, he looked like a recent arrival to the neighborhood who’d just got off his government job and decided to see what the clubs near his new home were like. He made small, completely unmemorable chat with half a dozen people, who all branded him as decent enough but bland. Forgettable.

Morten and his trio played a subtle game of one-upmanship (or, Horn supposed, one-upwomanship) all night, each member of the trio vying to become his favorite for the night. They laughed loudly at his wit, they danced with other men to make him jealous, they whispered things into his ear that Horn was quite grateful he couldn’t hear. In the end, the tallest of the group, a woman with auburn hair, won, at least for this evening. She left with Morten.

Burton Horn followed, regretfully considering that her victory would be short-lived.

“So,” the detective sergeant said. “Want to go over this again?”

The young woman ran a hand through her hair, trying to scratch away the fog in her mind.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me and this guy, well, we were having some drinks, having some laughs, when he asked if I wanted to come back to his place. And I figured, why not?”

“What’s this guy’s name?”

“Victor.”

“Victor what?”

She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”

“All right,” the sergeant said. “What happened then?”

“I already told you.”

“Tell me again.”

“We got a cab, and he gave an address up in Gratzstein, then we kinda got distracted in the back. After a while I looked up and it didn’t look like the way to Gratzstein at all, and I said ‘Hey!’ and just about then the driver turned around and I could see something in his hand, a little can. And I don’t know what happened after that.”

“He just reached back and sprayed you?”

“Right.”

“Wasn’t there a divider in the cab?”

This made the woman pause. “Hey… yeah! There was, there was when we got in! But, when he turned, it was gone.” She shrugged. “He must have done something to it.”

“And you didn’t see what?”

“No. We were, you know, distracted.”

“Okay,” the detective said, his voice weary. “He sprayed you. And?”

“I blacked out, I guess. The next thing I know I wake up in the cab, and the sky’s getting light, and there’s this thumping sound coming from the trunk, and my head hurts. I get up, get out of the cab, open the trunk…”

“Open the trunk?”

“Yeah. The keys… I had the keys in my hand when I woke up. The guy, the kidnapper, must have left them there.”

“He left you keys so you could free one of his victims?”

“I guess.”

“World’s nicest kidnapper. Okay, what was in the trunk?”

“This other guy wearing just his underwear, all tied up. I let him loose, we find a patrol, and then I’m here, telling you the same thing over and over.”

The door opened and another detective came in. He leaned over the table and whispered in the detective’s ear, “Got anything?”

“Nope,” he replied. “Your guy?”

“Picked up a fare in the afternoon; that’s the last he remembers before he wakes up in the trunk.”

“What do you think we ought to do?”

“There isn’t much that we can do,” the second detective said. “Get a description of this Victor fellow and put out a missing persons on him, and let these two go.”

Office of Paladin Jonah Levin, Geneva

Terra, Prefecture X

18 December 3134

The words did not come easily, but they came. They stumbled out of Henrik Morten’s mouth and into a microphone sitting on Burton Horn’s unsteady kitchen table. Coded into electromagnetic pulses, the words flew down a wire into a small black box where they were encrypted using a key intended for one use only. From the box they flew into an antenna, and from the antenna they flew into the air, across the city, a stream of information that would be total gibberish to everyone in Geneva except one man.

When they found their destination, the words traveled through a second antenna and a second black box, the only other one in Geneva—in the universe—with the correct encryption key. The black box decoded the signals into electromagnetic pulses, and then, without making a sound, back into words, as if reading to itself. A short trip through a thick cord brought the words to a printer, and the printer spilled out the interrogation of Henrik Morten almost instantaneously.

Jonah Levin sat by the printer, grabbing each sheet of paper as it emerged, hanging on every word of the conversation. Horn had asked, more than once, who hired Morten to kill Victor Steiner-Davion. That question had gotten him nowhere; it was possible that Morten would never intentionally reveal that information while he was alive. Since that highway was closed down, Horn was working through side roads, and some of them were turning out to be profitable. But, increasingly, Jonah didn’t like what he was reading.

One of the Knights Morten was talking about was Gareth Sinclair. According to Morten’s story, that’s how the situation on Ryde was resolved—a simple, though large, bribe. And it had been set up by Sinclair.

What worried Jonah even more was an earlier exchange, back when Morten was feeling feistier.