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 in 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?”
26
Counterinsurgency Task Force
Temporary Headquarters, Geneva