Duncan chose that moment to burst through her door with a fistful of notes.
“Not now!” Heather barked before Duncan could speak. He meekly backed out of the room.
She turned back to Jonah, who still stared at the screen. Air escaped his mouth like a leak from a tire. “That’s Henrik Morten.”
It was Heather’s turn to drop her jaw. “That’s Henrik Morten?”
Jonah finally pried his eyes off the screen. “You know who Henrik Morten is?”
“His name recently came up, yes. What do you know about him?”
Jonah shook his head and sat back in his chair.
“Looks like our meeting isn’t over yet,” he said.
39
Federal Penitentiary, Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
17 December 3134
It’s time, Heather thought, to get our hands a little dirty.
The election was only days away, and Levin had already done a pretty thorough job of milking official sources for information on Henrik Morten. The problem was, in matters like these, officials usually were quite deliberate about keeping themselves in the dark. The more they didn’t know about specific activities, the more they could deny.
Heather needed to talk to someone who would have a better knowledge of the ins and outs of insurgence plots, and the role, if any, Henrik Morten played in any of them.
Santangelo had wanted to come along, insisting (with all due respect) that he was a more intimidating presence than she, and might be better able to loosen the tongue of Heather’s quarry. However, the interrogation rooms of the federal prison on Geneva were closely monitored, and even a Paladin had trouble getting around those restrictions. The interviewee, knowing he couldn’t be physically assaulted, would be all but immune to Santangelo’s brand of intimidation.
One of the reasons Heather had risen to the rank of Paladin, though, was that she knew more than one way to loosen a tongue.
After negotiating four separate security checkpoints, Heather found herself waiting in a room one and a half meters square, barely large enough for the chair in which she sat. In front of her was a wall of thick ferroglass, and on the other side of the glass was an empty chair. She couldn’t see the tiny, nearly invisible camera lenses scattered in the walls in both rooms, but she knew they were there.
The door to the other room opened, and Royle Cragin strolled in. From the neck up, it appeared that prison hadn’t made a dent in Cragin’s personal style. His hair was carefully parted and every strand was in its appropriate place, and he still wore his horn-rimmed glasses, an affectation for a man with vision better than 20/20. He looked more like a prosperous investment banker than a detainee in a maximum-security prison. He certainly didn’t look like the revolutionary his court papers said he was.
Of course, Cragin’s personal style never would have allowed him to wear a fluorescent yellow jumpsuit, or magnetically clasped shackles on his ankles and wrists. He seemed to be used to the shackles, and he accomplished the short shuffle to his chair with something approaching grace. He said down smoothly, and Heather knew that the jumpsuit concealed a physique as powerful as it had been the day of his capture—a day that had ended with the death of two Knights of the Sphere.
“Paladin GioAvanti,” Cragin said, making no attempt to conceal his distaste. “I hope your appearance here means that my complaints about the conditions in this place have been heard.”
“I’m afraid not, Royle,” she said. “Besides, you know Paladins aren’t in charge of the jails.”
“That’s because they don’t want to be,” Cragin said. “The Paladins have the authority to be active in any area of The Republic in which they take an interest. Should they truly desire to fix our prison system, they could. They just feel more comfortable overlooking the tremendous inequities and dehumanization that occur regularly in prisons, so they pretend they have no oversight. Convenient for you, isn’t it?”
Heather sighed, hoping Cragin noticed. Setting him off on a political diatribe was about as difficult as rolling a ball down a hill. You just had to let it go.
“Well, Royle, if you’d like me to I could make some sort of promise to look into your complaints when I leave, but we both know I’d only be saying that to shut you up, so why should I bother?”
“Then we have nothing to talk about. Guards!” Cragin yelled. The door behind him, though, remained stubbornly closed.
In other circumstances Heather might have attempted charm, if only to annoy her opponent, but she knew it would have no effect on Cragin. His loathing for her was too deep for him to even notice.
“It’s my interview, Royle,” she said. “I’ll decide when it’s over.”
“Fine. I can sit here silently for as long as you please.”
“You’d actually shut up? What a novel phenomenon that would be.”
Cragin, true to his word, did not respond.
“How much longer do you have in here, Royle?”
Silence.
“Okay, that was rhetorical. Two years, four months. Now, here’s another thing I’m not going to do. I’m not going to dangle the possibility of getting your sentence reduced. Frankly, I don’t know that I could do it if I wanted to, and I certainly don’t want to. If it were up to me, you’d have a decade, maybe two, to go. But as it stands, you have two years, four months.”
Cragin did nothing to acknowledge her summary.
“You’ll still have a lot of living left when you get out. You won’t even be fifty. That gives you plenty of time to put your syndicate back together, do some more damage in The Republic. Sure, you’ll be under surveillance the minute you get out, but you know how to deal with that, right? I don’t think it’ll slow you down too much.”
As Heather well knew, it was impossible for Cragin to remain silent for any length of time. “You’ve got me all wrong, Paladin GioAvanti,” he said, using the country-boy tones that had almost swayed the jury to acquittal. “I’m a changed man. Prison’s reformed me. I’m on the straight and narrow from now on.”
“Then it seems our rehabilitation system is working fine. I’ll tell the proper authorities to disregard your complaints.”
Cragin glared.
“Anyway, Royle, you should be a little nicer to me, because I’m here to help you. I’m here to give you a warning.”
Cragin had decided to give silence another try.
“You’re not going to have anything when you get out. Your network, your people, your operatives, they’re not going to be there for you.”
Cragin shrugged. “It’s a big Republic, Heather.” He’d remembered how much it annoyed her when he’d called her that once, and he did it whenever he could. “There’s a lot of people.”
“But from the minute you get out, you’re going to be second best. Or worse. Why would people deal with you when there’s a better organized, better funded man with a more effective organization already in place? You’ll be finished before you get started.”
“You think I can’t handle competition?”
Heather surprised herself by taking the question seriously. “I don’t know, Royle. Maybe you can. But it’ll take time. You’ll have to wage a war between insurgent groups before you get to your real targets. Who knows how long that will take? Who knows how much older you’ll get, fighting just to get back into power? You have time, Royle, but I don’t know if you have that much time. Your competition’s going to be pretty stiff and, with the surveillance, you’ll be fighting with one hand tied behind your back.”
“Mmmm hmmm. And who is this competition I’m supposed to be worried about?”