The Scorpion Jar mda-13

by Jason M. Hardy

  “To begin,” he said, “we’re working from the assumption that Victor Steiner-Davion is dead because some person or persons physically intervened and made him so. Law enforcement in Santa Fe is tracing the perpetrators of the physical attack; we don’t need to duplicate their efforts.”

  He shook his head ruefully, and went on, “Whoever did the work was undoubtedly outside talent hired for the occasion, and if they haven’t already left Terra then they’ve gone so far to ground it would take a MiningMech to dig them out.”

  “I could find them,” said Horn. There was no false modesty in the words, only a statement of fact.

  “It would be a wasted effort,” Jonah replied. “They will have been hired by somebody anonymous working for somebody unknown. And such people are well paid to be incurious.”

  “What should I be looking for, then, in Santa Fe?” Horn asked.

  “The anonymous,” said Jonah. “Or better yet, the unknown. As well as any hints you can pick up concerning what Victor might have been doing that required his death at this particular time.”

  “As old as he was,” Horn said, “he can’t have been up to doing very much.”

  “Victor was scheduled to give the opening address to the conclave, and now that address will never be given. It’s hard to not make a connection. So, first—” Jonah counted off on his fingers “—he was doing something. And somebody found out about it. And whatever he was doing scared that person so badly that he or she sent for professional assistance.”

  “I think I follow,” Horn said, nodding gravely. “I’m to leave the job of apprehending the actual perpetrators to the Santa Fe police, while I concentrate on finding out what Steiner-Davion was doing and who might be threatened by it.”

  “Just so.”

  Horn looked thoughtful. “The source of the initial security leak is probably the best place to start.”

  “You know best how to do your work,” said Levin. “Meanwhile, I’ll be taking the other end. There’s a lot of people who stood to benefit from Victor’s death, and I’m afraid some of them are my colleagues.”

  “Anyone particular you’ll be looking at first?”

  Jonah sighed. “I don’t want to suspect any of them. But if I look at who benefited the most, there’re Kessel and Sorenson. They were the core of a bloc most likely to oppose whatever it was Victor was going to say. Their bloc just got more powerful. And there’s Tyrina Drummond. I don’t think she’d ever be involved in something as underhanded as an assassination, but there was no love lost between her and Victor. I’ll at least need to speak with her.”

  Horn nodded. “What about the guy who replaced Victor?”

  “Gareth Sinclair?”

  “Right. Didn’t he benefit the most from Victor’s death in the short run?”

  Jonah didn’t hesitate. “I suppose. But he’d have no way of knowing he’d be Victor’s replacement. And besides, I know Sinclair. He’s as decent as they come.” He shook his head. “Sinclair’s the last person I’d suspect.”

  19

  Elena Ruiz’s Apartment, Santa Fe

  Terra, Prefecture X

  29 November 3134

  Santa Fe in November was warmer than Geneva, but a chill still held the night. The air was warm and dry, and smelled of desert vegetation.

  Upon his arrival, Burton Horn had secured accommodations for himself in a budget-priced hotel. Once settled, he took advantage of his first opportunity for a long, private look at the file on Victor Steiner-Davion’s death. The file’s contents were detailed: witness statements; an autopsy report; a report on the crime scene by the responding officers of Santa Fe law enforcement; more witness statements and another report on the crime scene, this time from representatives of the Knights of the Sphere. Horn sat in the hotel room’s comfortable if somewhat worn armchair, with a tumbler of iced spring water close at hand, and worked his way through the pages while the tri-vid set flickered in the background, its sound turned off.

  According to the medical report, Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion had died of a sudden, massive heart attack. The report, Horn conceded, might be telling part of the truth. All sorts of things could bring on such a fatal attack, including putting up active resistance to a murder attempt.

  Local law enforcement officers, in their account of the crime scene, had reported the presence in Steiner-Davion’s rooms of a broken crystal liquor decanter and a similarly broken tumbler. Both decanter and tumbler could have shattered by accident when the Paladin collapsed, but the local law wasn’t buying that explanation. Not when the decanter had been smashed in a way that turned it into a sharp-edged weapon—and not when the blood that stained those edges belonged to someone other than Victor Steiner-Davion.

  Reading between the lines of the account, Horn experienced a wave of new respect for the old man. In spite of his age and ill health, the Paladin hadn’t gone down quietly. He had wounded at least one of his assailants. He’d marked a trail.

  Santa Fe law enforcement was already involved in the search for the perpetrators of the crime; Horn intended to leave them to it. A DNA analysis of the bloodstains would give them a trail to follow, a trail that would, in the fullness of time, yield the identity of the killer. Once that was known, there would be warrants issued and communiqués sent out and contact made with law enforcement agencies on other worlds, whereupon the object of their search would have to either resign himself to capture or abandon The Republic of the Sphere entirely. Such a search would be remorseless—the death of a public figure like Victor Steiner-Davion was not going to drop off of the law enforcement community’s monitor screens anytime soon—but it would be slow.

  Furthermore, as Jonah Levin had pointed out to Horn in Geneva, the search would yield only tools. It was unlikely to produce the men or women who had put them to use. For Horn’s purposes, the crucial question was how the killers had penetrated the impressive security around the Knights’ Santa Fe headquarters. Either they’re made of smoke and air, he said to himself, or they had inside help—witting or, perhaps, unwitting.

  Horn locked his files away in the hotel room’s jewelry safe and ventured out into the chilly, arid Santa Fe night to chat with the person who had seen and spoken with Victor Steiner-Davion the most often in the weeks just preceding his death; his nurse-housekeeper, Elena Ruiz.

  Ruiz lived in a one-bedroom apartment in an unfashionable part of Santa Fe. It wasn’t a bad neighborhood—there were no deals in illicit substances being struck on the street corners under the lampposts, no uncollected trash bags or abandoned vehicles left out by the curb, no empty buildings with broken windows—but it was drab and unpromising just the same. After an interval during which she had obviously been checking him out through the security peephole, Ruiz opened the door to his knock.

  “I’m Burton Horn,” he said, before she could tell him to go away. He unfolded his ID case, with its formidable array of authorizations, and held it up long enough for her to inspect it thoroughly. “I’m investigating the death of the late Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion at the request of Paladin Jonah Levin and of the Exarch. May I come in?”

  “Sure.”

  The woman sounded tired. She opened the door all the way and let Horn into her apartment. He sized it up at a glance. The living and dining areas were sparsely furnished but tidy, and Ruiz herself was a petite, dark-haired woman with a ready smile that was currently weighed down, disappearing almost immediately. Wearing a matted blue bathrobe and no makeup, she looked as if she had gone too long without sleep.

  Ruiz gestured him to a place on the couch and took a seat herself in the overstuffed armchair next to it.

  “I’ve already talked with the Santa Fe police,” she said. “And with my boss, and my boss’ boss, and a couple of Knights of the Sphere. If you’re working for one of the Paladins, you already know all this.”

  “I do,” he said. “But if you don’t mind, I want to hear the story from you directly.”

  “Story?”

  �
�About what happened the night Victor Steiner-Davion died.”

  She looked faintly puzzled, but attempted to answer the question just the same. “I didn’t find him—find his body, I mean—until I came in to work the next morning, and saw that he was…”

  “I know,” he said, as soothingly as he could. “I’ve already been over the scene with the police. You don’t need to revisit it. Right now, I’m more interested in what may have happened in the apartment the night before.”

  “I’ve already told the Santa Fe police that it wasn’t one of my nights on call,” she said.

  She sounded a bit defensive on the subject, he thought, and wondered whether the police and the Knights between them had been making her feel guilty about having a personal life outside of her work. Aloud, he asked, “You were out, then?”

  “Yes. With a friend.”

  The slight pause and the bit of warmth in her voice suggested that the friendship was more than casual. Horn made a mental note of that and continued.

  “I understand from the police report that as Paladin Steiner-Davion’s regular caregiver, you were able to monitor his status remotely?”

  She nodded. “I can—I mean, I could—access his security status and his biometric telemetry through my personal datapad.”

  “Which would give you—?”

  “A condensed version of whatever the on-call staff would be seeing when they looked at the big monitors,” she said.

  “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.

  20

  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 appe
arances 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.

  The woman was lucky. She managed to roll away from the vehicle a fraction of a second before it would have hit her, and scrambled, red-faced and panting, to her feet. Pointing a trembling hand at the man– not a Capellan, Henrik saw—who had been standing nearest her in the crowd, she shouted out an accusation that Henrik didn’t quite catch.

  The argument escalated faster than Henrik could follow, collecting a sympathetic crowd of partisan onlookers. He hesitated, acting as if he was torn between the desire to watch the conflict unfold and the desire to get away fast. As he waited, the knot of shouting, gesticulating people grew larger and took up more and more of the sidewalk.

  Somebody shouted a political slogan—“Strength and Dignity!” it sounded like, although what those qualities had to do with a woman nearly being run over by a bus in downtown Geneva, Henrik wasn’t sure—and somebody else shouted an insult. One man shoved another into the street, and was himself promptly knocked down by a third. The woman whose stumble into traffic had started the whole altercation was no longer anywhere to be seen.