—and recognition went right up his spine like a hot wire.
Jacob Ricel!
He turned.
The man was gone.
A moment's incredulous uncertainty went through Gabriel. Did I hallucinate? he thought. Did I just see someone who looked like him?
Itch. From the luckstone in his pocket, a sudden twinge of heat and power surged that he felt right through his hand.
No, dammit! Gabriel thought. Just a few doors behind him was the cross street, and he had glimpsed an alleyway leading from it between two buildings on the nearer side. Probably a service or delivery access. If he had gone that way.
Rina Welsh was maybe ten meters ahead, walking between Helm and Angela and talking animatedly to them. Grawl's broad back was briefly between her and Gabriel.
He immediately turned in his tracks, and trying not to hurry in this city full of armed people, this city where every move you made was noticed, he headed back the way he had come, feeling in his pocket and looking down at the ground like someone who had lost something. Gabriel retraced his steps—keeping them small steps, resisting the urge to let them lengthen into strides.
At the corner he paused, looked down the cross street along the ground. Two doors down he saw a shadow slip hurriedly into the alleyway.
Gabriel turned the corner and made for the alleyway. Behind him, in the main street, he could suddenly feel Enda look up in confusion and not see him there. Looking around for him—
He tried to draw in his attention like a tortoise hiding its head, tried to keep her from feeling where he had gone. At this moment of all moments, he did not want her to get involved. Gabriel walked casually and quietly into the alleyway, while inside he tried hard to bring to bear the half-unwanted talent that had been creeping up on him since Danwell and was getting stronger all the time. Come on, he said to that silent presence that was more or less inside him. I help you do what you're trying to. You help me, now.
A pause. A wash of sudden confusion from that interior core of thought and feeling that was not his own.
Come on, he thought again as he went quietly down the alley. It seemed blind, but there was no telling whether there were surveillance devices of some kind down here. He tried hard to look like a briefly confused tourist. Where's he gone? I need him. I need him alive. I've got questions for him, and I must have answers. Where is he?
Possibly confused by the sudden intensity, that interior presence gave no answer.
Then out of a little doorway that at first glance had seemed empty, Ricel jumped him.
Gabriel grappled with the man, intent on not hurting him and not allowing Ricel to hurt him back. They lurched back and forth in the alleyway.
That Ricel seemed unarmed heartened Gabriel. Then again, no one was allowed to go armed on Galvin. Where's his escort? Gabriel wondered. He must have slipped them somehow. There was little time to spend wondering how Ricel had managed to fool the Galvinite authorities into letting him pass.
What's he doing here?
Silly question. I'm here.
Whether I'm going to be able to find anything out from him.
They struggled, both hampered by their need not to be noticed and by the tight quarters in which they were fighting. Ricel was more interested in getting away, as he had been on the Lighthouse, but Gabriel was not going to allow that, not this time. He blocked Ricel's hands as they clawed at his face and tried to hammer into his head. Then he did a leg sweep and took one of Ricel's legs out from under him. Ricel went down. Gabriel threw himself on top of him, and this time, unlike at the Lighthouse, he did not miss.
They wrestled futilely on the ground for a few moments. Gabriel had already had this kind of encounter with the man once and had come off the worse. This time, though, he was not going to let that happen. He rolled, got a good grip on Ricel, turned over, came down on top—
"Gotcha!" he said softly.
Here it was, the moment he had been looking for, waiting for, for the better part of a year and a half. no, more like two years. Here under his hands was the man who had tricked him into killing one of his best friends and an ambassador he served with pleasure, a woman he respected above almost everyone else he had met in the service. This was not just someone who looked like him or was disguised as him either. This was the man himself, with the right wrinkles in the right places, the man he had served with on Falada. Here was the man who had destroyed his friendship with Elinke Dareyev—a loss he still felt profoundly, partly because he wasn't sure what might have come of it some day, partly because he also missed Elinke's friend and lover who died in the same accident, that mad spirit Lem, one of life's nice people who did not deserve such a sudden and terrible end. The terrible urge to kill Ricel, just kill him and be done with it came up, but Gabriel instantly crushed it down and away. Dead men make poor witnesses.
If I can ever get him off this planet to a proper trial, Gabriel thought desperately. He could just hear Norrik saying, "We shoot spies." Whatever else he might be, Ricel was certainly a spy. Gabriel could see himself in the weird position of trying to save Ricel's life. and failing. It would be too damned much irony for one day.
He didn't even have the freedom to simply beat the man into a pulp. Gabriel was getting into a very bad mood.
"I want some answers out of you right now," he said softly to Ricel. "They'll be here in a few moments. Why did you do what you did to me ?"
Ricel's eyes focused briefly on him.
Gabriel shook him. "Come on, talk," he hissed. "Why did you do it? Why did you set me up?!"
Ricel struggled one last time. Gabriel's hand clamped on his throat. Ricel tried to resist, but Gabriel squeezed harder and did something that had worked with the VoidCorp agent on Danwelclass="underline" he "bore down" with his mind, trying to create a sense of pressure and inevitability. All his anger weighed in behind it, making the pressure real.
Ricel's head twisted from side to side, as if he was trying to avoid a gaze he couldn't escape. "You had to," Ricel gasped, "they said you had to be split away. Discredited. She—"
He fell silent. That listening presence inside Gabriel "heard" something else: a sudden internal cry, desperate and horrified, as some kind of trigger snapped.
. and the body struggling with Gabriel began to spasm.
Gabriel gulped. Suddenly he knew what the trouble was. No, it's not fair!
Implanted suggestion. What it had been implanted to do was hard to tell. Gabriel suspected that somewhere inside Ricel, a blood vessel had just blown itself out. The brain was beginning to die.
Not fast enough, Gabriel thought.
He pushed himself upright and closed his eyes. He had done this once with a healthy brain, and with help, on Danwell. Now there was no help, but he had no choice. He remembered how it was done. No nonsense about "reading" a mind as if it were text, but more a business of listening, sealing everything else away, listening for the whisper in the darkness, and looking for the light that the buzz and business of your own mind would drown out otherwise. Four minutes to work in, no more. So make it happen. Darkness, silence, listen .