Captain Damien Harahap, Solarian Gendarmerie, known as "Firebrand," was not a happy man.

He sat at a small table in the Karlovac bar, nursing one of the capital city breweries' justly famed beers, and his gaze dropped for a moment to the old-fashioned printed newspaper on the table. He'd never much cared for such primitive versions of a proper 'fax, and he particularly resented the inability to go straight to a decent infonet to follow up the articles. He sometimes wondered how intelligence agents had done their jobs properly in preelectronic days. They must have spent literally hours every day just rummaging around through reams and reams of ink-smeary, finger-staining paper!

But this particular newspaper was especially infuriating because it suggested so much while confirming absolutely nothing. Oh, if he decided to take all the reporters' speculation and editorial commentary at face value, the news was disastrous. But he would almost have preferred to know that was true than to be reduced to guessing about things this way.

"NORDBRANDT DEAD?" "FAK TERRORIST FOUNDER KILLED!" "DEATH OF A MURDERER!"

The headlines, with the possible exception of the first, didn't seem to have much doubt. It wasn't until he got into the articles themselves that the questions became evident. The Karlovac -Tribune-Herald , which had bannered its afternoon's edition with the first headline, had been the most resistant to the general euphoria. As its lead writer had noted, "Government spokesmen continue to stress that no positive identification of Nordbrandt's remains has been made. Forensics specialists caution that it may never be possible to absolutely confirm that the remains in the National Police's hands are indeed those of the infamous terrorist. Nonetheless, there appears to be significant reason to believe she has, indeed, been killed."

Which would be just my luck, he thought bitterly. Two days ago. Just two days ago! If I'd gotten here two days earlier, she would've been too busy meeting with me to get her lunatic ass blown away like this!

It took all his formidable self-control to keep his expression tranquil and sip his beer as if he had no cares at all. Especially when he thought about all the spadework he'd done, all the preparation. Wasted. Just thrown away because the bloodthirsty bitch just had to go out into the field playing soldier!

He drew a deep breath and commanded himself to break the feedback loop of his temper. He was only making himself angrier by brooding on all his wasted time and effort, and there was no point in it. Besides, it was bad tradecraft.

He snorted in wry amusement at the thought. But it was true, and he took a deeper pull at his beer and sat back to think.

He'd underestimated her. He'd sensed a certain capacity for violence in her, recognized her as a potentially lethal tool, but he'd never imagined she might prove this violent. Her first attack on the planetary parliament had been more than sufficiently -spectacular-in fact, he'd been astounded, upon his arrival here, to learn she'd managed to carry out such an operation successfully. But the ensuing pattern of assassinations, bombing attacks on exposed portions of the Kornatian infrastructure, and general mayhem were even more surprising, in a way. Either he'd significantly underestimated the size of her organization, or else Kornati's security forces were even more inept than he'd believed possible.

Calm down, Damien. She probably had managed to put together a bigger organization than you thought. But she might not have, too. You haven't really had enough chance to analyze the operations she pulled off successfully to make a meaningful estimate of the organization she needed to do it. You're still reacting to these damned "newspaper" articles, and you know there's more than a little hysteria in the way they've been reporting things. This planet doesn't have much tradition of violence in politics. The emergence of any violent terrorist organization's obviously taken them by surprise. That's probably enough right there to explain how she managed the Nemanja bombing! And of course the newsies are figuring it took some kind of massive organization to pull it off. Just like the government is inevitably going to insist there are only a handful of the lunatic fringe out there throwing bombs.

The truth was that what looked to the local media like a carefully planned and orchestrated program of attacks might well be nothing of the sort. More than half the bombings appeared to have targeted things like public transportation stations and power transmission lines. Those sorts of targets were both highly visible and extremely difficult for even the best trained, most experienced security forces to protect. Most of those attacks could very well have represented nothing more than opportunity targets. The massive fire touched off by the bombing attack on the petrochemical storage tanks at Kornati's fifth-largest refinery would have required more planning and faced more significant opposition from both public and private security forces, but most of the other industry-oriented attacks had been on smaller factories or branch offices of banking and investment firms. Again, widespread strikes on relatively lightly defended targets which had helped generate a public perception of some sort of terrorist tsunami.

No, she hasn't really gone after all that many "hard" targets after all, has she? It just looks that way. Then again, that's what terrorist campaigns are all about. There's no way she and her true believers could ever have hoped to defeat the planetary government in an open, standup fight. But if she'd been able to convince enough of the public that the government couldn't crush her, either. Couldn't prevent her from hitting any target she chose...

Except that it was beginning to look as if the government had done just that.

He sighed, finished his beer, tossed a couple of local coins onto the tabletop, and stood. He tucked the folded newspaper under his arm-not because he was particularly interested in keeping it, but because leaving it behind might prick someone's curiosity if they'd noticed how intently he'd been scanning it earlier. It probably didn't much matter either way, but that sort of professional consideration was programmed into him on an almost instinctual level.

He stepped out onto the sidewalk and turned towards the local subway station.

It was a warm, sunnily pleasant day, as if deliberately designed to mock his gloomy thoughts, and he ambled along. He was halfway to the stairs leading down to the subway when someone stepped up close behind him. Instincts jangled, but before he could do more than inhale once, something hard pressed against the base of his spine.

"Keep walking... Firebrand," a voice said very quietly somewhere behind his left ear.

In all the bad holo dramas Harahap had ever seen, the steely-eyed, strong-jawed intelligence agent would have swept backwards with his elbow, catching his invisible assailant unerringly in the solar plexus, simultaneously disarming and disabling him. Then he would have paused to straighten his jacket before turning to his whooping, gasping foe, collecting his dropped weapon, and delivering some clever witticism for the defeated underling to relay to his superiors.

Life being life, and considering how difficult it was to survive when one's spine was blown in two, Damien Harahap kept walking.

His mind raced as they continued past the subway entrance. His first thought was that in the wake of Nordbrandt's death, her organization had come sufficiently unraveled for his cover to have been blown to the Kornatian National Police. But as he pondered it, he decided that didn't make a lot of sense. If the graybacks knew who he really was, they'd probably have approached this in a totally different manner. There were certain rules planets in the Verge knew better than to break, and one of them was that they never arrested and tried-far less thought about -imprisoning-Gendarmerie intelligence agents. No Verge government could afford the retribution Frontier Security would visit upon anyone who dared embarrass OFS that way. Besides, if the police meant to arrest him, why not simply do so? The fellow behind him had certainly gotten the drop on him with embarrassing ease. There was no reason to believe a larger arrest team couldn't have done the same thing. For that matter, the fellow behind him had had plenty of opportunities to inform him he was being taken into custody.

That left, so far as Harahap could see, only two real possibilities. The first, and more frightening, was that the KNP had decided not to take him into custody at all. They might know exactly who he was and believe he'd had even more to do with organizing and equipping the FAK before the Nemanja bombing than he had. If that were so, they might have decided to send a message to his superiors-or to him, at least-by simply making him disappear. In which case this relaxing little stroll was going to end in an alley somewhere with a pulser dart in his brain. Or, more likely, with his throat slit and his wallet stolen-an unfortunate victim of a violent robbery whose demise owed absolutely nothing to the Kornatian government whose parliamentary representatives he'd helped to murder. And if he did end up there, OFS would probably let it go. After all, one couldn't make an omelet without cracking the occasional egg. There were plenty more where he'd come from, and at least Kornati would have played by the rules and refrained from embarrassing Frontier Security in the Solly press.

The thought made him breathe harder and faster, but he didn't really think that was what was happening. How much of that was because he so desperately wanted it not to be was more than he was prepared to say, even to himself.

The second and, he sincerely hoped, more likely possibility was that Nordbrandt's organization hadn't been completely rolled up and that some remnant of it had recognized him when he turned up at the appointed contact point. In that case, whoever it was might be prepared to assume Nordbrandt's mantle and continue her struggle, in which case he-or she-undoubtedly wanted "Firebrand's" support more badly than ever. Or, he might have been recognized by one of Nordbrandt's survivors who only wanted a way off-planet and figured "Firebrand" was his best chance of arranging or extorting a ticket.

Of the various possibilities for his abduction, only the hope that it was one of Nordbrandt's people, regardless of his captor's precise demands, offered much chance for Harahap's continued breathing, so he decided to operate on that assumption.