Larrinaga swallowed and said, “Nothing, I suppose. That’s all I’ve done for a long time.”
“Get up,” Vierziger said. Larrinaga blinked at him.
“Get up!” Vierziger repeated, his voice cutting like a bread knife honed to a wire edge. His left hand reached for Larrinaga’s throat.
Georg Hathaway rose from his chair and backed away, mumbling to himself. Larrinaga jumped to his feet. “Are you going to kill me?” he shouted. “Go on! That way maybe I’ll see Suzette again!”
“Johann—” Mary Margulies said. Her arms were out to her sides; her hands spread wide.
Vierziger slapped the local man, an open-handed blow only to the cheek. It cracked like a pistol shot and knocked Larrinaga to the floor.
“Vierziger, slow down,” Sten Moden said, stepping from the console into the bar alcove. His manner was neither threatening nor afraid. He moved like a storm blowing off the sea.
With the same hand he’d used to slap, his left, Vierziger reached into his purse. He tossed several credit chips onto Larrinaga’s chest.
“There you go!” he said. “Three hundred thalers, enough to get you off this cesspool of a world and off to somewhere that you can be a man again. Do you want to do that? Do you want to be a man?”
Larrinaga got to his feet. “I am a man, Master Vierziger,” he said in a raspy voice. He met Vierziger’s eyes, and that took balls even if he really wanted to die. Margulies knew there were worse things than death, and she was pretty sure that Johann Vierziger had seen some of them.
Moden stood quietly, arm’s length from the pair of men. The situation was under control. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself by moving again.
Larrinaga gathered the credit chips in his hand and offered them back to the Frisian. Vierziger didn’t move.
Larrinaga put the money on the table at which he’d been sitting. “Thank you for the offer,” he said. “I don’t choose to leave Cantilucca while …what remains of my wife is here. But I’m not going to buy our house back by sitting here and cadging drinks, am I?”
He stepped around Vierziger because the Frisian wouldn’t shift to let him by. Larrinaga nodded to Moden and to Margulies. “Thank you for your hospitality, Georg,” he called to Hathaway. “I won’t return until I’m able to pay down my bill, though.”
He pulled open the front door and was gone. The mark of Vierziger’s hand on his sallow cheek blazed like a flag.
“Oh my goodness,” mumbled Georg Hathaway. He set upright the chair that had fallen over. “Oh my goodness!”
Moden sat down beside Bob Barbour. When things were serious, the big man seemed more like a force of nature than a human being.
Margulies let out a deep sigh of relief. She looked at Vierziger and shook her head ruefully. “You know,” she said, “I gotta hand it to you, Johann. You may just have saved that silly bastard.”
Vierziger looked at her. She remembered what she’d thought about the things he’d seen. “Nobody can save another person,” he said, so quietly that Margulies thought perhaps she’d imagined the words.
Vierziger walked to the staircase. “Niko!” he called. “Come down here, please, with your kit. We have work to do.”
Sten Moden glanced at the security lieutenant. He raised an eyebrow. Margulies shrugged.
Daun appeared at the top of the stairs, trying to buckle his equipment belt one-handed. The other hand held his larger equipment case and the sling of his sub-machine gun.
“What’s up?” he asked, jouncing down the steps.
“We’re going to check out security for our new employers,” Vierziger said. He opened the coat closet beside the front door and took out the attaché case he’d put there. The case was made of—at least covered with—reptile hide of some sort, black and shiny and as exquisite as every other part of Vierziger’s ensemble.
The only weapon he carried was the pistol over his right hip.
“Driving or walking?” the sensor tech asked. He stopped in the lobby and fastened the belt properly.
“You’re driving us,” Vierziger answered. “I’ll give you directions.”
He nodded goodbye to the others as he closed the door behind him.
“Doesn’t handle himself much like a sergeant, does he?” Sten Moden said to nobody in particular after the door closed.
“Yeah, I noticed that too,” Margulies said dryly. “Sten, did you know Joachim Steuben? Colonel Hammer’s hit man?”
Moden shrugged. “Saw him once, a long way away. I’d heard he was dead.”
“He is dead,” Margulies said. “I saw the incident report. Took a 2-cm bolt slap between the shoulder-blades. No trouble with the identification—head and limbs weren’t touched. But there’s no curst doubt he was dead—”
The two officers looked at the armored door without speaking further.
“Bingo!” said Barbour. He’d gone on with his search while everyone else was focused on Johann Vierziger. “I’ve got what the major’s looking for!”
“Well, call it in to him,” Sten Moden said. “Sounded like he meant it when he said ASAP.”
Barbour touched the channel one button on the console.
Mary Margulies leaned over the intelligence officer’s shoulder to see the highlighted name. “Cargo Supervisor Terence Ortega,” she read aloud. She frowned. “The name’s familiar for some reason.”
“Now,” said Johann Vierziger as the door to the underground garage quivered. Daun ran the jitney forward five meters, across the head of the ramp.
Suterbilt’s armored four-wheeled van pulled halfway through the doorway. The driver slammed on his brakes in a panic when he realized the lighter vehicle was halted across his passage.
Vierziger stepped off the back of the jitney with the attaché case in his left hand and a bright smile on his face. The van’s headlights fell across him. “Master Suterbilt!” he called in a cheerful voice. “Just the man we’re looking for! We’ve identified a security problem.”
The van’s driver opened the door and stepped out onto his running board. He pointed a bell-mouthed mob gun through the crack at the Frisian. Vierziger walked over and extended his right hand to the driver. The local man aimed the mob gun skyward and shook hands, looking confused.
“Who are you?” Suterbilt called from inside the vehicle. After a moment, he got out and walked a step up the ramp.
“Johann Vierziger of the Frisian Defense Forces,” Vierziger answered enthusiastically. “We’ve run a security check on L’Escorial—and yourself, of course, since you’re really the most important—”
“I’m not a member of any local organization!” Suterbilt interrupted hastily. “I work for Trans-Star Trading.”
“Of course you do,” Vierziger agreed with a patently oily smile. “Of course. But—you can see how significant you are to us, to the FDF, surely?”
He waved his hand toward the street traffic. “That other lot, they’re boobs with guns. They don’t matter to professionals like ourselves, whatever color they happen to be wearing when we go to work. But you, Master Suterbilt …Anything that could affect our payment is a matter of serious concern.”
The TST offices were on the second floor of the building Suterbilt was leaving on his way home. He glanced up at the block of lighted windows.
“We have a security system as well as guards,” he said in dawning nervousness. “Do you think …?”
“It’s not here that we foresee a problem,” Vierziger explained. “After all, an attack on TST doesn’t affect you personally. We’re more concerned that the work of art you have in an outlying dwelling would be targeted. You have a Suzette, do you not? A psychic ambiance that’s probably worth close to the value of the warehouse which Astra has already destroyed.”
Except for the pistol on his hip, Vierziger looked like an unusually well-dressed businessman from a highly developed world. The reptile-skin case caught the light of passing vehicles as he gestured with it. The shimmer drew attention away from his right hand—gun hand—which moved scarcely at all.