No, she hasn't really gone after all that many "hard" targets after all, has she? It just looks that way. Then again, that's what terrorist campaigns are all about. There's no way she and her true believers could ever have hoped to defeat the planetary government in an open, standup fight. But if she'd been able to convince enough of the public that the government couldn't crush her, either. Couldn't prevent her from hitting any target she chose…
Except that it was beginning to look as if the government had done just that.
He sighed, finished his beer, tossed a couple of local coins onto the tabletop, and stood. He tucked the folded newspaper under his arm-not because he was particularly interested in keeping it, but because leaving it behind might prick someone's curiosity if they'd noticed how intently he'd been scanning it earlier. It probably didn't much matter either way, but that sort of professional consideration was programmed into him on an almost instinctual level.
He stepped out onto the sidewalk and turned towards the local subway station.
It was a warm, sunnily pleasant day, as if deliberately designed to mock his gloomy thoughts, and he ambled along. He was halfway to the stairs leading down to the subway when someone stepped up close behind him. Instincts jangled, but before he could do more than inhale once, something hard pressed against the base of his spine.
"Keep walking… Firebrand," a voice said very quietly somewhere behind his left ear.
In all the bad holo dramas Harahap had ever seen, the steely-eyed, strong-jawed intelligence agent would have swept backwards with his elbow, catching his invisible assailant unerringly in the solar plexus, simultaneously disarming and disabling him. Then he would have paused to straighten his jacket before turning to his whooping, gasping foe, collecting his dropped weapon, and delivering some clever witticism for the defeated underling to relay to his superiors.
Life being life, and considering how difficult it was to survive when one's spine was blown in two, Damien Harahap kept walking.
His mind raced as they continued past the subway entrance. His first thought was that in the wake of Nordbrandt's death, her organization had come sufficiently unraveled for his cover to have been blown to the Kornatian National Police. But as he pondered it, he decided that didn't make a lot of sense. If the graybacks knew who he really was, they'd probably have approached this in a totally different manner. There were certain rules planets in the Verge knew better than to break, and one of them was that they never arrested and tried-far less thought about -imprisoning-Gendarmerie intelligence agents. No Verge government could afford the retribution Frontier Security would visit upon anyone who dared embarrass OFS that way. Besides, if the police meant to arrest him, why not simply do so? The fellow behind him had certainly gotten the drop on him with embarrassing ease. There was no reason to believe a larger arrest team couldn't have done the same thing. For that matter, the fellow behind him had had plenty of opportunities to inform him he was being taken into custody.
That left, so far as Harahap could see, only two real possibilities. The first, and more frightening, was that the KNP had decided not to take him into custody at all. They might know exactly who he was and believe he'd had even more to do with organizing and equipping the FAK before the Nemanja bombing than he had. If that were so, they might have decided to send a message to his superiors-or to him, at least-by simply making him disappear. In which case this relaxing little stroll was going to end in an alley somewhere with a pulser dart in his brain. Or, more likely, with his throat slit and his wallet stolen-an unfortunate victim of a violent robbery whose demise owed absolutely nothing to the Kornatian government whose parliamentary representatives he'd helped to murder. And if he did end up there, OFS would probably let it go. After all, one couldn't make an omelet without cracking the occasional egg. There were plenty more where he'd come from, and at least Kornati would have played by the rules and refrained from embarrassing Frontier Security in the Solly press.
The thought made him breathe harder and faster, but he didn't really think that was what was happening. How much of that was because he so desperately wanted it not to be was more than he was prepared to say, even to himself.
The second and, he sincerely hoped, more likely possibility was that Nordbrandt's organization hadn't been completely rolled up and that some remnant of it had recognized him when he turned up at the appointed contact point. In that case, whoever it was might be prepared to assume Nordbrandt's mantle and continue her struggle, in which case he-or she-undoubtedly wanted "Firebrand's" support more badly than ever. Or, he might have been recognized by one of Nordbrandt's survivors who only wanted a way off-planet and figured "Firebrand" was his best chance of arranging or extorting a ticket.
Of the various possibilities for his abduction, only the hope that it was one of Nordbrandt's people, regardless of his captor's precise demands, offered much chance for Harahap's continued breathing, so he decided to operate on that assumption.
They'd walked another eight or nine blocks before the man behind him spoke again.
"In the middle of the next block. Number 721. On your right. Up the steps, in the front door, and continue to the end of the hall."
Harahap allowed himself a small nod and started looking for street numbers.
The next block consisted of tall, narrow tenement buildings. Back on prespace Old Earth, they might have been called "brownstones." Here on Kornati they were called "one-suns" because they were packed so closely together that only one wall had windows to admit sunlight. These particular one-suns were a bit more rundown than some, but not as badly as many others. It was an industrial district, and the blue-collar workers who lived here earned enough money to aspire to a somewhat higher standard of living.
They came to Number 721, and Harahap turned to his right and up the steps as if this had been his destination all along. The front door had been repainted fairly recently, in a deep, dark green that seemed out of place in this grimy, urban setting. It wasn't locked-doors seldom were in this part of town, where renters could rely on their neighbors to break the kneecaps of anyone stupid enough to try to rob or burglarize any of their fellow residents-and it opened at his touch.
He walked down the hallway, smelling a combination of cooking, faint mildew, and people living too close together. The door at the end of the hall swung open at his approach, and he stepped through it to find himself face-to-face with a dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complexioned woman of medium height.
"I suspected the rumors of your unfortunate demise were exaggerated, Ms. Nordbrandt," he said calmly.
"So I decided to let them think they'd gotten me, at least for a week or two," Agnes Nordbrandt said thirty-odd minutes later.
She and Harahap faced one another across a small table in the one-sun apartment's tiny kitchen. A pot of some sort of soup or stew simmered on the old-fashioned stovetop behind him, and he sat with his hands on the table, a mug of surprisingly good tea clasped loosely between them, while he watched her face. It seemed thinner than at their last meeting, harder. And there was a brighter, fiercer glitter in her dark eyes. The nascent fanaticism he'd sensed from the outset was stronger. He'd seen that before, in his line of work. There were some who harbored a natural predatory streak, sometimes without ever suspecting it themselves. People who turned out to have a taste for blood, who actually enjoyed doing what still went by the euphemism of "wet work." Agnes Nordbrandt, it appeared, fell into that category.
"They did get some good people," she continued more harshly, then stopped and made herself relax. "And, while I suppose the reports of my death may be disheartening to some of our cells, I expect the blow to the government's credibility when it turns out I'm not dead to more than offset any interim damage."