So far, Nohar had gotten more information from the pinks than they'd gotten from him. Apparently, somewhere in Cleveland was a major flush industry. Somewhere, the DEA didn't know where, was the lab, or labs, that manufactured the flush for the drug trade throughout the center of the country. The Zips were the major dealers of flush on the street level.
Conrad was doing his variation on being reasonable. "We don't want you. We want the labs. Tell us where they are, or give us some names we can work with. We can intervene with the local judicial system, make it easy for you."
He had already protested his ignorance. So he ignored them and studied the acoustic tiles, silently counting the holes that formed abstract patterns in the white rust-stained fiberglass. He wanted to go home, forget about Zips, Binder, MLI. Worse, he was beginning to worry about Stepnie. Someone torched Thomson. Of the people with access to the finance records, that only left Stephie and Harrison.
It was going to be a long night. At least he knew
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Mclntyre was blowing smoke out his ass about the cash. If the money was dirty, they'd know by now, and he wouldn't be in an interrogation room at police headquarters. He'd be in a cell in the federal building. As it was, all they had was the fact any morey with that much cash had to be guilty of something. When Nohar didn't respond, rant number six was on the horizon. Mclntyre never got to deliver on the steaming invective he must have been considering. Harsk
opened the off-white metal door and let in Is-ham, who was still wearing her mirrorshades. Harsk smelted angry. He pointed at the agents and hooked his thumb out the door. "Mclntyre, Conrad, get out here. I have to talk to you." Mclntyre wasn't impressed. "We aren't done here."
"Out, now!" Harsk was pissed. The DEA pinks obviously didn't expect this from someone they saw as a local functionary. They collected their recording equipment and left.
That left him alone in the room with I sham. She skidded a key ring at him across the formica table. It came to a stop right in front of him. She indicated his handcuffs.
"Take those off."
She didn't wait for him. She turned around to face the large mirror on the wall opposite Nohar. She took off her sunglasses, knocked on it twice, and pointed back toward the door. "I'm waiting."
The comment wasn't addressed to him.
Nohar didn't want to be alone in a room with this woman.
He thought he heard a door open out in the hall. She had just dismissed the cops stationed behind the oneway mirror. By the way her head nodded and moved, he could tell she was watching the cops leave.
"Now we can talk in private." She turned around to face him and smiled. He finally saw her eyes in the light. They looked like a pink's eyes at first, with round FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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iris and visible whites. But there were few, if any, pinks with yellow irises, and none with slitted pupils.
"Aren't you going to remove those?"
He had forgotten about the cuffs. He picked up the keys and fumbled them off. "What's a frank doing working for the FBI?"
She put her sunglasses back on. Now there was no visual cue to her nature. But she was still not a pink. For one thing, she didn't have a scent. For another, her breathing was silent. This woman could be behind him and he would never know she was there.
She paused a moment before she spoke. "The executive isn't as picky about humanity as some people would like. If it wasn't for the domestic ban on macro gene engineering, they'd build their own agents.''
Nohar slid the cuffs and the keys back across the table. He tried not to let his nervousness show, but she could probably smell it as well as he could. "So they pick up whatever trickles over the border? *'
"Let's get down to business. I want information."
Nohar sighed. "I told the DEA I knew jack—"
That evil smile widened. If she had been a morey, the display of teeth would make him fear for his life. "Those schmucks never dealt with moreys before. They're convinced all moreaus know each other and are involved in the drug trade."
She reached into a pocket and tossed a grainy green-tinted picture on the table. It showed a shaggy gray canine in desert camouflage. It had been taken with a light enhancer.
Even with the rotten resolution, there was no question it was Hassan.
"I am searching for a canine calling himself Hassan Sabah. Contract assassin, specializes in political killings. Started in the Afghan occupation of North India. Works for every extremist cause you can name. Japanese nationalists, Irish republicans, South African
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white supremacists, Shining Path social humanists in Peru—"
Every group she mentioned was punctuated by a picture dropped on the table: the car bomb that took out the Chinese political director in Yokohama; the hotel fire that killed three UK cabinet ministers in Belfast; the half-dozen Zulu party leaders hacked apart by machetes in Pretoria; the barracks of
lepus-derived infantry taken out by a remote truck filled with explosives in Cajamarca . . .
"Hassan smuggled himself into the country last year with the Honduran boatlift. The Fed didn't know he was in the country until a native of Belfast living in Cleveland recognized this canine." Isham tapped Hassan's picture with one of her slightly-pointed nails. "He's in the country, and he's involved with the Zip-perheads."
"Why aren't you talking to your tip?" Nohar had an idea why. A morey from Belfast meant a fox.
Isham flipped out another picture, confirming No-har's suspicion. The picture snowed a morey vulpine, very dead. The fox had a small-caliber gunshot wound, close range, right eye.
"She was our witness. Whelp fox from North Ireland. Had the bad luck to be in a street gang that called itself Vixen— I see you know what happened to Vixen. Never got the chance to contact her."
She leaned back and glanced, over her sunglasses, at the one-way mirror. Then, satisfied, she went on. "The Fed only has suspicions of what Hassan is doing. But it scares Washington. Joseph Binder's Senate campaign seems to be his latest target. The Fed thinks a radical morey organization is operating out of Cleveland. The terror attacks by the Zipperhead gang give credibility to the suspicion."
"You want information on Hassan."
"We put you and Hassan in the same area on at least three separate occasions. When Hassan killed a local pimp named Tisaki Nugoya. During the attempted as-FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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sassination of Stephanie Weir, former assistant to the late Daryl Johnson. And the arson attack that killed Desmond Thomson,"
"Hassan was there?"
"One of the security guards lived long enough to give us a tentative ID."
Maybe he could bargain. "What do I get for talking to you?''
Isham took oif her glasses and looked at Nohar as if she was examining a corpse to determine the cause of death. "You'll get my good will."
The smile was gone. "Nohar, you are going to walk. Make me happy."
Nohar scratched his claws across the linoleum and decided he didn't want Isham as an enemy. "I'll tell you, but it's mostly second-hand . . ." He gave her the story, as he saw it, leaving out the MLI angle in deference to client confidentiality. Saturday the 19th, Young had let Hassan into Johnson's house. Johnson gets whacked by Hassan's Levitt. Thursday the 24th, while Stigmata is being wiped up by the Zipheads, Hassan takes position up on Musician's Towers during a thunderstorm and blows Johnson's picture window. Thursday the 31st, Young empties the Binder finance records, torches them, and himself, on the 1st. Monday the 4th, the Zips attack the coffeehouse. Hassan and Terin are together in the four-wheeler.