It was clearly a dismissal. "Yes, sir. I'll talk with you in the morning, then."
Turning, Galway stalked out the door. He'd had as much of Quinn as he could stand for the moment, anyway... and whether the general knew it or not, he was right.
Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
Chapter 16
The alarm's twitter snapped Kanai out of a troubled sleep, and almost before he was fully awake he had rolled out of bed, shuriken pouch in hand. The window was intact, the door to the rest of the house still closed. Taking a deep breath, he eased over to the window and cracked the shade away from the wall.
It was perhaps half an hour before dawn, judging by the faint glow starting to compete with the haze of city lights to the east. Traffic was practically nonexistent at this hour; parked cars lined both sides of the street, none showing any lights. Touching a hidden wall switch, Kanai shifted a section of the glass to infrared sensitivity. Nothing—all the cars within view had apparently been parked there for several hours. But the alarm had been triggered from that side of the house.... He was just about to step to his monitor for a complete area scan when a lone figure came into view, striding purposefully along the walk toward his front door.
Lathe, was his first instinctive guess; but another second's observation eliminated that possibility.
The man's walk showed none of a blackcollar's feline grace; his obvious glances to left and right were a far cry from the more subtle awareness of his surroundings that was the blackcollar norm.
Which meant it wasn't one of Kanai's teammates, either. And at this hour of the morning, it sure as hell wasn't a casual visitor.
He stepped to his room monitor, keyed for a center-walk view with light amplification. It would be another couple of seconds before the man would be close enough for a good look; reaching to his bedside, Kanai scooped up his robe and the nunchaku hidden under the pillow. Eyes on the monitor, he got the robe on... and swore under his breath.
The man walking up to his door was General Quinn.
The doorbell rang twice in close succession; impatience personified mechanically. Jamming his nunchaku into the robe sash, Kanai reset his alarms and headed for the door.
"General," he said coolly as he unlocked the reinforced panel and swung it open. "You're up rather early."
Quinn didn't bother with even the forms of politeness. "Kanai," he growled, brushing past the blackcollar and into the living room. "You putting them up here?" he added, glancing around him.
"Putting who up?"
"Don't play innocent," Quinn snarled, turning back to face him. "You know who—Comsquare Damon Lathe and his pack of troublemakers, that's who."
Kanai felt his stomach tighten, consciously relaxed it. "They're not here. Sorry to disappoint you."
Quinn grunted. "What do they want here?"
"What business is it of yours what our clients want?" Kanai countered.
"Don't insult my intelligence, Kanai. These aren't ordinary money-slicers renting you to cut other money-slicers' throats—these are guerrilla soldiers who want to rekindle the war. If I were you, I'd be thinking about what something like that would do to my cozy arrangement here in Denver."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning that if you and Bernhard rock the boat too hard it's going to sink with you aboard it."
Quinn smiled sardonically. "Do I detect a grain of surprise at Bernhard's name? Thought we didn't know who your leader was, did you? Believe me, Kanai, we know just about everything there is to know about your team—you can't run around the way you have for so many years without scattering a lot of lint along the way."
"Perhaps," Kanai said as calmly as he could. "You might find it expensive to try and get more than just information, though."
"Sure we would—why else do you think we've put up with you this long? But we could do it, if we had to."
Kanai nodded. "All right, consider the point made. If that's all you came for, you can go now."
Quinn ignored the offer. Pulling a photo from his pocket, he flipped it through the air toward Kanai.
"Ever seen this man before?" he asked.
The blackcollar caught the photo, looked at it. "No. Should I have?"
"Name's Allen Caine. Has Lathe mentioned him to you?"
"Again, no. What's he done that has you so interested in him?"
"In other words, how much do we know? Forget it. But as long as we're on the subject of information, what exactly are you doing for Lathe and what's he paying for it?"
Kanai cocked an eyebrow. "As someone here just said, forget it. You've about worn out your welcome, Quinn."
Casually, the general looked around the room. "You've got a nice place, Kanai," he said. "A real nice place. A lot nicer than the interrogation cells in Athena; a damn sight nicer than a box underground."
He brought his gaze back to Kanai. "Take some good advice and stay away from Lathe."
"Or else?" Kanai said softly.
"Or else," Quinn replied. "Consider it a threat or a warning, I don't care which. But believe it." With one last glance around the room, he walked past Kanai to the front door. A moment later he was gone... and the blackcollar spun and threw, his pent-up frustration burying his shuriken center-deep in the far living-room wall. The thud of its impact was a thunderclap in the silent house, its sound almost covering up the ancient Japanese curse he spat in the same direction.
—
"The cabin should be just over this next rise," the pilot told Galway, easing the small spotter craft between a pair of tall pines. "Sorry about the ground-scratching here, but I have to stay low because of the Ryqril base over to the south—their lasers recognize their own aircraft, but I've never gotten a really airtight guarantee that we get the same courtesy."
"Fine by me," Galway said, swallowing. "I'd just as soon show up unvaporized myself."
The pilot grinned and gave his full attention back to his flying. Galway kept his eyes on the landscape ahead and tried to relax, and a minute later they were there.
To find that the term "cabin" hardly did the place justice. "Mansion" was a far more appropriate term—a single story, rustic-walled millionaire's hideaway. The lump in Galway's throat grew another size, and it was all he could do to keep from ordering the pilot to lift and get him the hell back to Athena where he belonged. But the aircraft was already crunching down onto the forest mat, and at the cabin doorway he could see the owner watching him.
He stepped out almost before the craft was fully stabilized, walking over to the cabin with artificial confidence. "I'm Jamus Galway," he identified himself as he approached the man. "I called from Athena this morning. You are Prefect Ivas Trendor...?"
"Former prefect," the older man said curtly. "Long since retired. Come in, Galway."
He led the way to a living room the size of Galway's entire Capstone apartment and gestured to a feather-plait couch. "This had better be as important as you claimed," he warned as he took a matching chair across a glow-pit from the couch. "I have even less interest in getting involved in Denver's Security programs than Quinn has in my doing so. I presume you didn't tell him you were coming?"
"No, sir, but as I mentioned this morning I'm essentially a free agent—"
"Which also thrills Quinn right down to the marrow, I expect."
"Ah—I think that's a fair statement, sir. But I felt I had to see you because I've come across information that indicates you may be in danger."
Trendor's eyebrows lifted with polite skepticism. "You'll forgive me if I tell you that's ridiculous," he said. "Why would anyone want to hurt me?"
Galway shrugged uncomfortably. "I can't say for sure, sir. But I looked up the record of your tenure as Security prefect, and—well, it occurred to me that it might have made you some enemies."