Part 53 (1/2)

Hanan was waiting for them around the corner in a line car. ”Now, that was a masterpiece,” he said with a grin as the two of them piled into the line car with him. ”You know, Chandris, you have the makings of one of the all-time greats.”

”I'll stick with the quiet life, thanks,” she said. ”What did you write in those letters, anyway?”

”Trade secret,” he said. The grin was still in place, but as Chandris looked closely at him she could see the weariness setting in as the adrenaline-driven thrill of the morning's events faded away. The weariness, and the pain he'd been trying so hard to hide. ”So, Jereko. Where should we drop you off?”

”The Gazelle,” Kosta told him. ”It should be ready to fly by now, right?”

”Right,” Hanan said, frowning. ”You realize, of course, that's the obvious place for them to start once they sort out the mess upstairs.”

”Let's hope they think it's too obvious,” Kosta said firmly. ”But either way, the Gazelle it is.”

He looked at Chandris. ”I've got some experiments to run.”

The sprinklers had been shut down and the more hysterical partic.i.p.ants hustled out, but the scene was still one of chaos when Forsythe arrived.

”What happened here?” he demanded.

In that first flurry of responses he got five different answers, all of them mutually contradictory, none of them making much sense. But through it all, one fact became clear as a winter morning.

Kosta was gone.

Slowly, crunching through scattered papers and desktop equipment, he crossed the room toward his open office door, his feet making unpleasant noises as they squished through the waterlogged carpet.

”When did this happen?” he asked the soaked office manager.

”Not fifteen minutes ago, High Senator,” the manager said. He looked remorseful, embarra.s.sed, and

furious all at the same time. ”This man called claiming to be-”

”Thank you, I heard,” Forsythe said, dismissing the man with a curt wave of his hand. Stepping into his office, he gazed at the empty room, the weight of the gun hidden beneath his jacket tugging at his soul like a lump of frozen guilt.

The gun he had brought to use on Kosta. A gun with which he'd planned to kill a man in cold blood.

What in the world had he been thinking of?

He shook his head, wondering what had happened to him. His private refusal to accept an angel in

the first place had been on purely moral and ethical grounds. Or so he had thought. And now, to

conceal that decision, he'd been prepared to commit murder.

Could everyone else have been right all along? Was there something about the angels that politicians genuinely did need?

Could his father have been wrong?

There was a rapid crunching of wet papers from behind him. ”High Senator,” Pirbazari puffed, coming up beside him. ”I just heard. He's gone?”

Forsythe nodded. ”He's gone.”

Pirbazari swore under his breath. ”I'll get an all-grid alert out immediately. We'll get him back. Him,

and the rest of his Pax team.”

He spun around. ”Don't bother,” Forsythe said, catching his arm. ”It wasn't any Pax commando team that did this.”

Pirbazari frowned at him. ”What do you mean?”

”Look around you,” Forsythe said, waving at the office workers cleaning up the mess. ”No one hurt,

no real threats made, no weapons drawn except for a silly fake knife hilt. Not the sort of subtlety you would expect from people who would build a s.h.i.+p like the Komitadji.”

”Then who?”

”Who else?” Forsythe said. ”Our young liner stowaway and professional con artist, Chandris Lalasha.”

Pirbazari's forehead wrinkled. ”She could have been the girl,” he conceded slowly. ”But someone said there was a man involved, too.”

Forsythe hesitated. It was obvious from the description that the man had to have been Hanan Daviee, fresh from his stint at the hospital. But Pirbazari apparently hadn't gotten the full story yet. ”Probably one of her friends,” he said. ”She's been here for months now. Plenty of time to build up contacts.”