The entry foyer was lit but deserted, as was the hallway beyond its double doors. Caine and Braune padded quietly past a row of closed office doors, turned a corner—
And came face to face with Geoff Dupre.
The big man stopped with a jerk, the steaming cup in his hand sloshing dangerously. "You!" he half whispered.
"No noise," Caine warned, letting the other see the shuriken in his hand. "We aren't going to hurt anyone unless you make that necessary. Understand?"
Dupre licked his lips. "What do you want?"
"Take us to your office first. No sense in standing around out here."
In silence Dupre led them down the hall to a cluttered room near the building's center. An open interior door showed several men working at a line of consoles beneath a computerized wall map alive with spidery lines. Braune caught Caine's eye and nodded fractionally toward the room before closing the door and positioning himself beside it. Caine closed the hallway door and gestured Dupre to his desk chair. The big man hesitated, then sat down. "Well?" he asked, almost belligerently.
Caine regarded him coolly. "You have a real talent for getting your courage up at the wrong times," he told the other. "Where do you store the explosives in this building?"
Dupre's mouth twitched. "Explosives?"
"Things that go bang," Braune supplied. "You use them in digging new aqueducts for the water system, remember?"
Dupre flicked a glance in Braune's direction, then looked back at Caine. "There aren't any real explosives here. All that stuff is kept in the operations warehouse."
"What have you got here?"
"Nothing really except some primer caps that we sometimes send down the pipes to clear out blockages. They're not very powerful."
"They'll do for a start," Caine said. "Where are they?"
"What're you going to do with them?" Dupre asked.
"Clear out some blockages of our own. Where are they?"
For a moment Dupre seemed ready to argue the point further. Then his eyes dropped to the star in Caine's hand and he sighed. "They're in the basement storeroom."
"Good. Braune, go with him and get a box or two."
They left. Caine waited until the sounds of their footsteps had faded down the hall, then stepped to the inner door and cracked it open. Four men, backs to him, were working at the consoles. Pulling the paral-dart pistol from his pocket, Caine eased into the room, eyes darting around for anyone he might have missed seeing. Then he lined up the gun on the farthest man and squeezed the trigger.
Five seconds later all four were sprawled in their seats, fully conscious but unable to move. Stepping to the consoles, Caine gave them a quick scan and settled down to work. By the time Braune and Dupre came looking for him he had found a complete map of the water retrieval system and was halfway through printing a copy. "Any trouble?" he asked Braune, eying the long, flat box cradled under the other's arm.
Braune shook his head. "But we'd better get moving," he said, glancing at the sprawled figures.
"There are at least another five to ten people wandering around the building."
"Right. Almost ready." Caine looked at Dupre, who was staring at his paralyzed colleagues with a mixture of horror and fascination. "Dupre, I'm afraid you're going to have to join them," he told the man, drawing the paral-dart gun from his pocket once more. "Lie down and get comfortable."
Dupre's jaw tightened visibly, but he obeyed without argument. Caine sent a cluster of paral-dart needles into the man's shoulder and then, after a moment's hesitation, returned the gun to his pocket.
The gun's unfired shots would tell them later which of the plethora of paralyzing drugs was being used locally, a bit of knowledge that would be crucial if they ever needed to counteract its effects themselves. Virtually all antidotes to paralyte drugs were highly toxic unless the corresponding drug was already in the bloodstream.
A minute later the last of Caine's requested maps was finished, and he and Braune began their withdrawal. Luck was with them; they saw no one as they made their way down the corridors, out to their car, and across the lot to the fence. The guard's eyes held impotent rage as Caine opened the gate and rejoined Braune. Leaving the gate open, they drove off into the night.
—
The same woman as on the previous night was sitting in the coatcheck window when Lathe and Skyler came into the Shandygaff bar, her makeup still far too heavy for Lathe's taste. "Good evening," he nodded to her, gesturing toward the main room. "Mr. Charm in tonight?"
"Who?" she frowned.
"The short lad with the itchy palms and the mobile guardhouses," Skyler amplified.
"Oh—Mr. Nash. The guardhouses' names are Briller and Chong, if you're interested." She cocked her head. "What did you do to Chong last night, by the way?"
"Who, us?" Lathe asked innocently.
She studied him for a moment, then shrugged slightly. "It doesn't matter, I guess. All three are here tonight, if you really care, wandering around inside somewhere. And, uh, Mr. Kanai is also here.
Shall I have a waiter take you to him?"
"We'll find him," Lathe assured her. On his wrist, his tingler came to life as Skyler covertly tapped out a message: Kanai: Lathe and Skyler are here.
Kanai; Bernhard's with me. Come back; booth four, seventy-five degrees from entrypoint.
"Talk to you later," Lathe said to the girl. Skyler was already through the door; lengthening his stride, the comsquare caught up. Angling to the right, they headed through the tables until they spotted Kanai.
"Good evening," Kanai said as they slid into the booth. "May I present Commando Jorgen Bernhard.
Comsquare Damon Lathe; Commando Rafe Skyler."
Bernhard nodded in turn, his eyes cool. "From...?"
"Most recently, Plinry," Lathe told him.
The other's eyebrows rose at that, but if he was overly impressed he hid it well. "I see. A long way from home, then. All the more reason why you need our help."
" 'Need' may be too strong a word," Lathe said. "But we certainly could use it."
"You're pretty confident for a couple of strangers who don't even know how this city operates,"
Bernhard returned. "You need our help, all right. The only real question is whether or not you're worth risking our position over."
"Kanai said the same thing," Lathe said. "If you're trying to inflate your fee, consider the point made."
A tight smile flicked across Bernhard's face. "If you're expecting me to take offense, you're wasting your time. I've been insulted by people far more skilled at it than you." He folded his hands into a double fist on the table in front of him, his dragonhead ring glinting as he did so. "Let's get down to business. You want a list of high-ranking military people who were here during the war, correct?"
Lathe nodded. "More specifically, I'm interested in those people who were with the Aegis Mountain contingent."
Bernhard's face didn't change, but for just a second his clenched hands seemed to tighten. "Why Aegis?" he asked carefully.
"Why not? It was the major installation in this part of the continent, so it's reasonable to assume the top of the cut would have been assigned there."
Bernhard snorted. "Don't. We had as many dimbos at all levels as any other base I've seen."
"Ah—so you were in Aegis, too," Lathe said. "Good. You'll know who the best people were, then."
Bernhard's face hardened. "Sure. They're the ones who stayed behind to run the krijing machines when the gas attack began and the rest of us ran like geldings."
"Gas attack?" Skyler frowned. "Aegis was supposed to be proof against that sort of thing."
"It was," Bernhard said quietly, eyes focused somewhere else. "We think a neutron warhead must have cracked a fault line and taken out the gas sensor and filtration system in one of the ventilation tunnels. By the time the interior environment sensors let us know the gas was coming in, it was too late."