Rodriguez shook his head. ‘I don’t need to listen to this!’
I realised that it was entirely possible that he had received some kind of message from the Reptile House. Normally I snapped on a comms bracelet before I left camp, but I had forgotten it in my haste this morning. Someone calling from the House would only have been able to get as far as the camp.
I turned to Rodriguez. ‘Then take your hand slowly out of your pocket.’
‘Don’t tell me you believe the bastard!’
‘I don’t know what I believe. But if you’re telling the truth, all you’ve got in there is a rations pack.’
‘Tanner, this is—’
I raised my voice. ‘Just do it, damn you!’
‘Careful,’ Vicuna hissed.
Rodriguez drew his hand from the pocket with magisterial slowness, glancing to myself and then Vicuna all the while. What came out, gripped between thumb and forefinger, was slim and black. The way he held it, in the perpetual gloom of the forest floor, it was almost possible to believe it was a rations pack. For a moment I did.
Until I saw that it was a gun, small and elegant and vicious; engineered for assassination.
Vicuna fired. Perhaps I had underestimated the skill that it would take to seriously incapacitate someone even when they stood so close, for the doctor’s slug only hit Rodriguez in the shoulder of his other arm, causing him to stagger back and grunt, but no more than that. Rodriguez’s gun flashed and the doctor fell backwards into the mulch.
On the edge of the clearing, Cahuella shrugged off his rifle and was on the point of bringing it to bear.
‘No!’ I started to shout, willing my master to save himself by getting as far away as possible from Rodriguez, but — as I belatedly realised — Cahuella was not the kind to walk away from a fight, even one in which his own life might be contested.
Gitta screamed for her husband to follow her.
Rodriguez levelled the gun towards Cahuella and fired…
And missed, his slug slicing through the bark of a nearby tree.
I tried to find some sense in what was happening, but there was no time. Vicuna appeared to have been correct. Everything that Rodriguez had done in the last few moments was consistent with the ghoul’s statement… which meant that Rodriguez was — what?
An impostor?
‘This is for Argent Reivich,’ Rodriguez said, drawing his aim again.
This time, I knew, he would not miss.
I raised the monofilament scythe, thumbed the invisibly fine cutting thread to its maximum, piezo-electrically maintained length: a hyper-rigid mono-molecular line extending fifteen metres ahead of me.
Rodriguez, out of the corner of his eye, caught what I was about to do, and made the one mistake which marked him as an amateur, rather than a professional assassin.
He hesitated.
I swung the scythe through him.
As the realisation of what had happened dawned on him — there could have been no immediate pain, for the cut was surgically clean — he dropped the gun. There was a terrible frozen moment, one in which I wondered if I had not made a mistake as grave as his hesitation, and that I had somehow failed to extend the scythe’s invisible line as far as I had imagined.
But there had been no mistake.
Rodriguez toppled to the ground, twice.
‘He’s dead,’ Dieterling said, when we were back in the one tent in the camp which had not been deflated. Three hours had passed since the incident by the tree, and now Dieterling was leaning over the body of Doctor Vicuna. ‘If only I had understood how these tools of his worked…’ Dieterling had spread a pile of the ghoul’s advanced surgical toys next to him, but their subtle secrets had refused to yield to him. The normal medical supplies had not been sufficient to save him from Rodriguez’s shot, but we had hoped that the doctor’s own magic — gleaned at considerable expense from Ultra traders — would have been powerful enough. Perhaps, in the right hands, it would have been — but the one man who could have used those tools profitably had been the one who most needed them.
‘You did your best,’ I said, a hand on Dieterling’s shoulder.
Cahuella looked down at the body of Vicuna with unconcealed fury. ‘Typical of that bastard to die on us before we could use him properly. How the hell are any of us going to be able to put those implants into a snake?’
‘Maybe catching the snake isn’t our absolute top priority now,’ I said.
‘You think I don’t know that, Tanner?’
‘Then try acting like it.’ He glared at me for my insubordination, but I continued anyway, ‘I didn’t like Vicuna, but he risked his life for you.’
‘And whose fucking fault was it that Rodriguez was an impostor? I thought you screened your recruits, Mirabel.’
‘I did screen him,’ I said.
‘Meaning what?’
‘The man I killed couldn’t have been Rodriguez. Vicuna seemed to agree with me, too.’
Cahuella looked at me as if I was something he had found stuck to the bottom of his shoe, then stormed out, leaving me alone with Dieterling.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘I hope you have some idea what happened out there, Tanner.’ He pulled a sheet over the dead Vicuna, then began to gather up the neatly glistening surgical tools.
‘I don’t. Not yet. It was Rodriguez… at least it looked like him.’
‘Try calling the Reptile House again.’
He was right; it was an hour since I had last tried, and I had not been able to get a call through then. As always, the girdle of comsats around Sky’s Edge was patchy and subject to constant military interference, elements mysteriously breaking down and coming back online for the nefarious purposes of other factions.
This time, however, the link worked.
‘Tanner? You’re all okay?’
‘More or less.’ I would elaborate on our loss later; for now I needed to know what Doctor Vicuna had been told. ‘What was the warning you relayed to us about Rodriguez?’
The man I was dealing with was called Southey; someone I had known for years. But I had never seen him look as disconcerted as he did now. ‘Tanner, I hope to God… we got a warning ourselves, from one of Cahuella’s allies. A tip-off about Rodriguez.’
‘Go on.’
‘Rodriguez is dead! They found his body in Nueva Santiago. He’d been murdered, then dumped.’
‘You’re sure it was him?’
‘We have his DNA on file. Our contact in Santiago ran an analysis on the body — it was a one-to-one match.’
‘Then the Rodriguez who came back from Santiago must have been someone else, is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yes. Not a clone, we think, but an assassin. He would have been surgically modified to look like Rodriguez; even his voice and smell must have been altered.’
I thought about that for a few moments before replying, ‘There’s no one on Sky’s Edge with the skill to do something like that. Especially not in the few days that Rodriguez was away from the Reptile House.’
‘No, I agree. But the Ultras could have done it.’
That much I knew, Orcagna having practically rubbed our faces in his superior science. ‘It would have to be more than just cosmetic,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Rodriguez — the impostor — still behaved like himself. He knew things only Rodriguez really knew. I know — I talked to him often in the last few days.’ Now that I considered those conversations, there had at times been something evasive about Rodriguez, but obviously nothing serious enough to rouse my suspicions at the time. There had been much that he had been perfectly willing to discuss.
‘So they used his memories as well.’
‘You think they trawled Rodriguez?’