“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.”
“That’s all, Tony? I think you know more than that.” Horn eased up with his foot. “Let’s save some time and trouble. What did this guy look like?”
“An ordinary guy,” Tony said. His voice was getting fainter. “Light eyes, pale hair . . . I never saw him before. Please, I was just going to fool with her, nothing big.”
“What did this guy say to you? Exactly.”
“I was supposed to come here, and tell her that if she knew what was good for her she’d leave town and not talk to anyone.”
“And that was it? I don’t believe you.”
Tony’s words tumbled out. “As God is my witness, that’s all he said. A hundred up front and a hundred after, to convince her to leave!”
“Are you sure that’s all he said for you to do?”
“He said if she got scared enough she’d run for sure.”
Horn looked down at his prisoner. The man’s face was white, and getting steadily whiter wherever the blood from the bullet crease along the side of his face wasn’t caked or running. His skin was getting sweaty.
“What then? If she ran, where were you going to go to collect the other half of your money?”
Delgado’s breathing was getting faster and shallower. He was gasping for air. “He said I should just . . . come to the bar . . . he’d . . . find me.”
“What bar?”
“The Clover . . . Cloverleaf.” Delgado’s voice was faint. “I want . . . something to drink. I’m thirsty.”
“No,” said Horn. “You’re dead.”
His blow to the man’s back had ruptured the renal artery, from the look of things, and Delgado was bleeding out internally. Horn moved away from Delgado’s wrist, but Delgado didn’t make a move. He was too busy trying to breathe.
24
The Golden Apple Restaurant, Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
4 December 3134
After a long day’s work, Jonah Levin usually ate dinner alone in his favorite small restaurant near the Pension Flambard. The Golden Apple Restaurant had been run by the same family for three generations; it had starched linen tablecloths and sparkling crystal and heavy, solid silverware, and its kitchen staff was devoted to making meals that caused you to forget everything except what was currently in your mouth. Tonight Jonah had enjoyed roasted chicken and herbed rice and a glass of white wine from the Bernkastel vineyards, a good meal that didn’t do much to lift his mood of growing dissatisfaction.
He was, abruptly, buried in politics. A diplomat had a connection, however tenuous, to Victor Steiner-Davion’s death, and a Senator of The Republic had lied to his face about that diplomat. This wasn’t the battlefield, where his enemies were clearly marked. This was a game where even those who lied to him might, in the end, turn out to be on his side, while those he trusted the most might be working to undermine everything he did.
He hated this game.
Leeson’s lie convinced him of the need to find out more about Henrik Morten. To get what he really needed, he had to abandon official channels for a time. He had to talk to people that Burton Horn would be better equipped to interrogate, do things that were best left to people who were not Paladins. But Horn was in Santa Fe, and other help, at such short notice during the holidays, was tough to find.
With the help of a name or two supplied by Horn, Jonah had poked and prodded enough to turn up someone who, provided with the proper incentive, might tell Jonah what he needed to know. This investigation is only a few days old, Jonah told himself, and I’m already perfectly willing to pay a bribe. Politics.
This wasn’t what he was built for. This wasn’t what had gotten him this far. He could move an army ahead; he could engage in single combat; he could
do anything that war demanded. The rest of this—the investigation and all its trappings—seemed like a black hole of inaction, sucking the life out of him.
He did not like thinking of himself as an action addict; he’d known people like that long ago, when he was only a captain in the Hesperus militia, and he had learned firsthand how they got other people killed.
“Don’t be silly.” He could hear Anna’s remembered voice in his head—as always, like reason and conscience in one. “Being good at something isn’t the same as being addicted to it.”
He had some skills, though, that made him nervous. He recognized his own tendency to use calculated and metered force simply because he was good at it; he knew that sometimes, in a crisis, he could completely set aside emotion and see himself and others only as means to a necessary end.
Yet he despised this same quality in politicians. They saw governance as a game of power, and the vast quantities of cash and people at their disposal as mere means to the end of building and consolidating power. If he was to get through this investigation and the election, he would have to subsume that part of him that begged for simple clarity, for forceful ways to achieve simple goals.
He had finished the last of his meal. The waiter brought the pastry cart to the table, but Jonah shook his head.
“Coffee only,” he said.
When it came, dark and aromatic in a porcelain cup, he sipped at it thoughtfully. He had enough self-awareness these days to know that a return of the dark moods of his youth usually signaled an idea trying to work its way out of his subconscious, and running into unpleasant memories on the way. If he didn’t want to spiral downward into several days’ worth of profound depression—and that would be a bad thing, with Anna so far away—he would have to haul the idea out into full view and look at it straight on.
Well then, he said to himself. Let’s see what triggered it this time.
He ran over the past few minutes’ train of thought, looking at the memories and images it had evoked, testing them one by one as they came past.
Violence . . . no.
Suppressed urges toward rash behavior . . . closer, but not quite.
The need for action, and the use of others in carrying out that action . . . yes, that was the thought that brought a twinge of pain, like pressing on a bruise.
Jonah sighed. “All right,” he murmured under his breath, checking his chronograph. “I’ll just use myself.”
“Hey, hey, hey, that’s my spine! What do you think you’re . . .”
Jonah shifted his left arm and gave a slight twist with his right.
“AHHHHH! Stop it! I don’t even know what that is, but you’re hurting it!”
The bartender, as Jonah had suspected he would, paid no attention to the conflict. He sat back on an unpainted wooden stool and waited for Jonah to exert enough effort that he’d work up a thirst.
The only other customer, who looked like a mouse in a trench coat, had darted away as soon as Jonah leapt off his stool and grabbed the informant. They had the bar to themselves—thirty square meters of worn, stained linoleum was now Jonah’s interrogation chamber.
Jonah eased the pressure a little. “You want to renegotiate the deal now?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the man gasped. “I’ve decided, ah, I don’t need any more cash.”
“Good.”
“How about, here’s a deal, you stop hurting me, I start talking.”
Jonah nodded. “Sounds good.” He let the man go, picked up his stool and signaled the bartender for another round. The stool the informant was sitting on had shattered when Jonah knocked him off it, so he pulled over a new one.
The man next to Jonah wiped beads of sweat off his upper lip, grabbed an ice cube from his drink and rubbed it on his now-bulbous nose.
“It’s not broken,” Jonah said.
“Yeah, yeah, but it hurts, okay?” The man shook his head. “I gotta get out of town. Things are a little out of control right now. And not in the way I like it.”
“Henrik Morten,” Jonah said.
“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?
25
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 i
n 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?”
The Scorpion Jar Page 11
