The change of aiming point caused Horn to miss the greater part of his target. Instead of going down with his head in ruins, the man slapped his hand to the side of his face and howled, “You shot my ear off! You shot my goddamned ear off!”
Bright red blood poured out from between the man’s fingers. It would be only a moment, though, before he remembered that he had a pistol.
Horn threw the holdout pistol at the stranger’s face. Instinctively, the man ducked. In that moment Horn was on him, taking the man on the side of his knee with a reaping side kick and knocking him to the floor on top of Elena Ruiz.
The man began to push himself up on his hands. Horn stamped down heavily on the stranger’s back above his right kidney. The man cried out in pain and went down. He hadn’t been wearing an armored vest after all.
Horn reached down, grabbed the man’s shirt, and pulled him off Elena Ruiz. He rolled the man over onto his back and stepped down hard on one of his wrists.
“Who are you?” Horn demanded.
The man glared up at him. “I’m nobody.”
“You can do better than that.” Horn put his weight on the man’s wrist, and ground in his heel a bit. “Listen. You’re already dead. If you answer my questions I’ll make it quick. Otherwise…” He stepped down hard on the wrist again. The man moaned. “Now—who are you?”
“Delgado,” the man said. “Tony Delgado.”
“Good start, Tony,” Horn said. “Who hired you?”
“Some guy,” Delgado said.
Horn started to press down his heel again.
Delgado gasped. “I swear, he never said his name! He offered me two hundred stones to come mess with this lady, that’s all.”
“That’s all, Tony? I think you know more than that.” Horn eased up with his foot. “Let’s save some time and trouble. What did this guy look like?”
“An ordinary guy,” Tony said. His voice was getting fainter. “Light eyes, pale hair… I never saw him before. Please, I was just going to fool with her, nothing big.”
“What did this guy say to you? Exactly.”
“I was supposed to come here, and tell her that if she knew what was good for her she’d leave town and not talk to anyone.”
“And that was it? I don’t believe you.”
Tony’s words tumbled out. “As God is my witness, that’s all he said. A hundred up front and a hundred after, to convince her to leave!”
“Are you sure that’s all he said for you to do?”
“He said if she got scared enough she’d run for sure.”
Horn looked down at his prisoner. The man’s face was white, and getting steadily whiter wherever the blood from the bullet crease along the side of his face wasn’t caked or running. His skin was getting sweaty.
“What then? If she ran, where were you going to go to collect the other half of your money?”
Delgado’s breathing was getting faster and shallower. He was gasping for air. “He said I should just… come to the bar… he’d… find me.”
“What bar?”
“The Clover… Cloverleaf.” Delgado’s voice was faint. “I want… something to drink. I’m thirsty.”
“No,” said Horn. “You’re dead.”
His blow to the man’s back had ruptured the renal artery, from the look of things, and Delgado was bleeding out internally. Horn moved away from Delgado’s wrist, but Delgado didn’t make a move. He was too busy trying to breathe.
24
The Golden Apple Restaurant, Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
4 December 3134
After a long day’s work, Jonah Levin usually ate dinner alone in his favorite small restaurant near the Pension Flambard. The Golden Apple Restaurant had been run by the same family for three generations; it had starched linen tablecloths and sparkling crystal and heavy, solid silverware, and its kitchen staff was devoted to making meals that caused you to forget everything except what was currently in your mouth. Tonight Jonah had enjoyed roasted chicken and herbed rice and a glass of white wine from the Bernkastel vineyards, a good meal that didn’t do much to lift his mood of growing dissatisfaction.
He was, abruptly, buried in politics. A diplomat had a connection, however tenuous, to Victor Steiner-Davion’s death, and a Senator of The Republic had lied to his face about that diplomat. This wasn’t the battlefield, where his enemies were clearly marked. This was a game where even those who lied to him might, in the end, turn out to be on his side, while those he trusted the most might be working to undermine everything he did.
He hated this game.
Leeson’s lie convinced him of the need to find out more about Henrik Morten. To get what he really needed, he had to abandon official channels for a time. He had to talk to people that Burton Horn would be better equipped to interrogate, do things that were best left to people who were not Paladins. But Horn was in Santa Fe, and other help, at such short notice during the holidays, was tough to find.
With the help of a name or two supplied by Horn, Jonah had poked and prodded enough to turn up someone who, provided with the proper incentive, might tell Jonah what he needed to know. This investigation is only a few days old, Jonah told himself, and I’m already perfectly willing to pay a bribe. Politics.
This wasn’t what he was built for. This wasn’t what had gotten him this far. He could move an army ahead; he could engage in single combat; he could do anything that war demanded. The rest of this—the investigation and all its trappings—seemed like a black hole of inaction, sucking the life out of him.
He did not like thinking of himself as an action addict; he’d known people like that long ago, when he was only a captain in the Hesperus militia, and he had learned firsthand how they got other people killed.
“Don’t be silly.” He could hear Anna’s remembered voice in his head—as always, like reason and conscience in one. “Being good at something isn’t the same as being addicted to it.”
He had some skills, though, that made him nervous. He recognized his own tendency to use calculated and metered force simply because he was good at it; he knew that sometimes, in a crisis, he could completely set aside emotion and see himself and others only as means to a necessary end.
Yet he despised this same quality in politicians. They saw governance as a game of power, and the vast quantities of cash and people at their disposal as mere means to the end of building and consolidating power. If he was to get through this investigation and the election, he would have to subsume that part of him that begged for simple clarity, for forceful ways to achieve simple goals.
He had finished the last of his meal. The waiter brought the pastry cart to the table, but Jonah shook his head.
“Coffee only,” he said.
When it came, dark and aromatic in a porcelain cup, he sipped at it thoughtfully. He had enough self-awareness these days to know that a return of the dark moods of his youth usually signaled an idea trying to work its way out of his subconscious, and running into unpleasant memories on the way. If he didn’t want to spiral downward into several days’ worth of profound depression—and that would be a bad thing, with Anna so far away—he would have to haul the idea out into full view and look at it straight on.
Well then, he said to himself. Let’s see what triggered it this time.
He ran over the past few minutes’ train of thought, looking at the memories and images it had evoked, testing them one by one as they came past.
Violence… no.
Suppressed urges toward rash behavior… closer, but not quite.
The need for action, and the use of others in carrying out that action… yes, that was the thought that brought a twinge of pain, like pressing on a bruise.