The Scorpion Jar

by Jason M. Hardy

  Heather called up a screen on her noteputer.

  “Henrik Morten,” she said.

  The receptionist’s hands flew, and he called up information that he read to Heather.

  She slumped her head, looking defeated. “That’s the same information she gave me.”

  “And that’s what you had to break into her office for.” The receptionist shook his head. “With all due respect, Paladin GioAvanti, I’m not sure you’re applying your brute force in the right places.”

  Heather shot a glare at the receptionist, as if pondering a retort, but she said nothing. She let her shoulders fall, then walked away—the very picture of defeat. Or so she hoped.

  Once she was out of view of the receptionist, her shoulders lifted and her pace quickened. That wasn’t her preferred method of getting information but, when dealing with people who thrived on humiliation, sometimes it was necessary to give them a little of what they wanted to get what you sought. So much the better if they ended the encounter thinking they had stymied her; hopefully, thinking her defeated, they would ignore her as she finished her work.

  43

  Les Rues-Basses, Geneva

  Terra, Prefecture X

  17 December 3134

  Burton Horn had a pretty good list of places not to go. Morten’s Geneva home, his three favorite restaurants, a nightclub where he was often spotted, homes of his closest political supporters. There was no chance he’d be showing his face at any of those spots right now. Horn could go and strong-arm some of Morten’s friends, but, as enjoyable as that might be, it wouldn’t get him anything. If Morten was as clever as he was supposed to be, he wouldn’t have let anyone close to him know where he was staying.

  But even if Morten was going to different places, he was still the same person. Heather GioAvanti had passed contact information from Senator Derius along to Jonah, and Jonah gave it to Horn. Some of it told him nothing—the telephone number was a disposable one, now disconnected, and though the electronic contacts traced back to Geneva, they were easily accessible from anywhere in the world. The physical address was only a post-office box, but that at least was a strong indication that Morten was, in fact, in Geneva. It also helped Horn figure out where in the city he might be.

  Horn knew that, if Morten was in the city, he was still going to clubs, still looking to end most nights with a pretty girl on his arm, and still trying to live comfortably, though anonymously. He might give up some places, but Horn couldn’t believe Morten would give up his lifestyle.

  Only a few neighborhoods in the city would give Morten the kind of life Horn knew he craved. High-rent districts contained too many eyes that might recognize him, sleepy middle-class areas would not give him enough ways to spend the considerable sums he’d earned recently, and Horn was sure Morten wouldn’t be caught dead living in a slum (neighborhoods that, according to the proponents of The Republic’s Golden Age, didn’t exist).

  That pointed Horn to the recovering neighborhoods in the city, places starting to stand up again after years of being trodden under the city’s collective feet. In a decade or so, these areas would become high-rent districts, full of designer boutiques and restaurants so exclusive their name doesn’t appear on their exterior. At the moment, though, they were a mix of artists, recent college graduates, and long-time residents perplexed by the sudden popularity of their neighborhoods. They exploded with new restaurants and trendy nightclubs, and the residential turnover was so rapid that most people in these places didn’t recognize each other. This kind of community would be a perfect place for Morten to hide.

  One of these areas, Les Rues-Basses, happened to be within walking distance of the post office Morten was using. Les Rues-Basses seemed to cycle from high-rent to poverty every quarter century or so, always traveling the path to one type of community or the other, never stabilizing at either end of the spectrum.

  The docksides, at least in the current incarnation of Les Rues-Basses, were the most deserted part of the neighborhood. But that was soon to change. Abandoned warehouses lined the wharfs, but most of them bore “Coming Soon!” signs that advertised soon-to-be-constructed residences that cost as much as Horn would make in a decade.

  Sandwiched between these warehouses was a grimy brick building, a holdout from the old community, with a “Furnished Room for Rent” sign in the front window. Thanks to his ability to pay in cash (working with a Paladin’s expense account had definite benefits), Horn had been allowed to take immediate occupancy of the room the previous day.

  His new apartment needed to be both a base of operations and, hopefully, an interrogation chamber. To that end, it needed some work. The layout was simple—long, narrow main room with a small kitchen branching off its end and a bathroom tucked in a corner. Brown stains had already started to peek through a recently applied single coat of off-white paint, and the stiff carpet crunched lightly as Horn walked on it. The supplied furnishings were a threadbare couch, a table that rocked on its legs, and four plastic chairs. A bed folded down from one of the walls.

  The first task was changing the lock. Horn knew at least three different ways to mess with a keycard lock, and he was supposed to be on the legitimate side of the law. Sometimes old technology was the best; Horn installed a metal cruciform lock that required a key to operate from either side of the door. Locks like that were very hard to find, but part of Horn’s job was knowing where he could pick up such items.

  The windows were next, one off the main room and one off the kitchen. Each window frame received six nails to make sure it would stay shut. Horn then installed a metal grate across each window just in case Morten felt like trying to jump through.

  He disabled every electrical outlet except one in the main room. That meant the refrigerator no longer worked, but Horn wasn’t planning on cooking.

  The final necessary adjustment to the apartment was insulation. He set a white noise generator in the center of the main room, then toyed with the settings until the field covered the whole room. Anyone trying to eavesdrop by listening through the walls or doors wouldn’t hear more than a murmur of white noise. It wasn’t foolproof—the right microphone could pierce the field like a needle through fabric—but precious few people in Geneva, let alone Les Rues-Basses, had such equipment. And Horn intended to make sure he didn’t get the attention of those who had such resources.

  He had to bring up the final alteration from his hover vehicle. Thankfully, the building had a freight elevator, because Horn didn’t relish lugging the solid metal chair up the narrow stairway. Throwing a sheet over it to keep the built-in restraints from drawing attention, Horn hustled it up to his door before anyone became interested in what he was doing. Once he had it inside, Horn bolted the chair to the floor, then made sure the restraints were in working order.

  The room was ready. Now all Horn needed was a roommate.

  He visited half a dozen nightclubs and a dozen restaurants. At each place he had a different story and a different appearance. He had heard of people going to elaborate lengths to disguise themselves, wearing wigs and fake mustaches and rubber scars. Horn, though, always preferred to travel light, and his changes were simpler. His hair color didn’t change, but sometimes it was slicked back, sometimes tousled. At one restaurant he stiffened his posture to his full two-point-one meters, at another he slumped until he appeared to be no more than one-point-seven meters. At one location he was energetic, flailing his hands as he spoke, at another he was solemn and grave. In the end, none of the eighteen people he spoke to would have given the same description of him.

  None of them had ever heard the name Henrik Morten. But at least two of them had seen the face. One was a restaurant that Morten had come to once, about three days ago, and not returned since. The other was a nightclub Morten had been to each of the past two nights.

  He wouldn’t be there tonight, Horn knew. Morten was too smart to let himself fall into a pattern of visiting the same place too often. It was possible that Morten would never come
back to that club at all. But it gave Horn enough to put a wedge in. Now all he had to do was shove.

  It’s impossible to spend much time in a nightclub without gaining a radarlike sense for whom to avoid. Those who can’t develop that sense find themselves running through a series of bad encounters, which quickly disenchants them for the clubbing scene.

  At Frou-Frou that night, everyone’s radar was telling them to avoid the man hunched over the end of the bar. He was drinking rapidly, not once leaving his stool to dance. His shoulders were hunched, burying his face in his suit jacket. His right foot twitched with nervous irritability. You could tell at first glance that he was a drunk waiting for an excuse to get into a fight.

  No one sat within three stools of him, leaving the drunk to twitch over his drink, his eyes scanning restlessly back and forth, up and down the bar.

  It was a good disguise, Horn knew, but it made it tough to watch the whole club. He mainly tried to watch the door, catching a quick glimpse while he pretended to only be looking down.

  The other trick of this role was drinking enough to be convincing while staying sober enough to do the job. Luckily, Horn had been rehearsing for that part of the role his whole life.

  The job of keeping an eye on the door, though, suddenly became unimportant when the trio of young women entered. A blind man could have seen them. They appeared to be dressed in neon, with the brightest parts of their dresses hugging what they believed were their most flattering contours.

  Horn had a different sort of radar than the rest of the club-goers, and his went off as soon as the young women entered. He saw them scan the floor, frown a little, and confer with each other through a series of half-hearted shrugs. They strolled the floor for a few minutes, let everyone take a good look at them, danced with a few guys so they’d have the satisfaction of rejecting them when the music stopped, then left.

  No one noticed the mean drunk at the end of the bar leave. The three young women didn’t see him carefully trailing behind them.

  They visited a second club, with much the same result as the first. In their third club of the night, though, their eyes lit up when they saw someone they recognized on the dance floor. A handsome man with smooth hair, nearly black eyes, a cleft chin and an aristocratic air.

  Henrik Morten.

  They greeted him enthusiastically, calling him “Vic” (a small deception that made Horn inexplicably angry), and he danced with each of them in turn.

  Burton Horn the mean drunk had been replaced by Burton Horn the amiable newcomer. Top shirt button open, jacket over his shoulder, he looked like a recent arrival to the neighborhood who’d just got off his government job and decided to see what the clubs near his new home were like. He made small, completely unmemorable chat with half a dozen people, who all branded him as decent enough but bland. Forgettable.

  Morten and his trio played a subtle game of one-upmanship (or, Horn supposed, one-upwomanship) all night, each member of the trio vying to become his favorite for the night. They laughed loudly at his wit, they danced with other men to make him jealous, they whispered things into his ear that Horn was quite grateful he couldn’t hear. In the end, the tallest of the group, a woman with auburn hair, won, at least for this evening. She left with Morten.

  Burton Horn followed, regretfully considering that her victory would be short-lived.

  “So,” the detective sergeant said. “Want to go over this again?”

  The young woman ran a hand through her hair, trying to scratch away the fog in her mind.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me and this guy, well, we were having some drinks, having some laughs, when he asked if I wanted to come back to his place. And I figured, why not?”

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “Victor.”

  “Victor what?”

  She shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”

  “All right,” the sergeant said. “What happened then?”

  “I already told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “We got a cab, and he gave an address up in Gratzstein, then we kinda got distracted in the back. After a while I looked up and it didn’t look like the way to Gratzstein at all, and I said ‘Hey!’ and just about then the driver turned around and I could see something in his hand, a little can. And I don’t know what happened after that.”

  “He just reached back and sprayed you?”

  “Right.”

  “Wasn’t there a divider in the cab?”

  This made the woman pause. “Hey . . . yeah! There was, there was when we got in! But, when he turned, it was gone.” She shrugged. “He must have done something to it.”

  “And you didn’t see what?”

  “No. We were, you know, distracted.”

  “Okay,” the detective said, his voice weary. “He sprayed you. And?”

  “I blacked out, I guess. The next thing I know I wake up in the cab, and the sky’s getting light, and there’s this thumping sound coming from the trunk, and my head hurts. I get up, get out of the cab, open the trunk . . .”

  “Open the trunk?”

  “Yeah. The keys . . . I had the keys in my hand when I woke up. The guy, the kidnapper, must have left them there.”

  “He left you keys so you could free one of his victims?”

  “I guess.”

  “World’s nicest kidnapper. Okay, what was in the trunk?”

  “This other guy wearing just his underwear, all tied up. I let him loose, we find a patrol, and then I’m here, telling you the same thing over and over.”

  The door opened and another detective came in. He leaned over the table and whispered in the detective’s ear, “Got anything?”

  “Nope,” he replied. “Your guy?”

  “Picked up a fare in the afternoon; that’s the last he remembers before he wakes up in the trunk.”

  “What do you think we ought to do?”

  “There isn’t much that we can do,” the second detective said. “Get a description of this Victor fellow and put out a missing persons on him, and let these two go.”

  44

  Office of Paladin Jonah Levin, Geneva

  Terra, Prefecture X

  18 December 3134

  The words did not come easily, but they came. They stumbled out of Henrik Morten’s mouth and into a microphone sitting on Burton Horn’s unsteady kitchen table. Coded into electromagnetic pulses, the words flew down a wire into a small black box where they were encrypted using a key intended for one use only. From the box they flew into an antenna, and from the antenna they flew into the air, across the city, a stream of information that would be total gibberish to everyone in Geneva except one man.

  When they found their destination, the words traveled through a second antenna and a second black box, the only other one in Geneva—in the universe—with the correct encryption key. The black box decoded the signals into electromagnetic pulses, and then, without making a sound, back into words, as if reading to itself. A short trip through a thick cord brought the words to a printer, and the printer spilled out the interrogation of Henrik Morten almost instantaneously.

  Jonah Levin sat by the printer, grabbing each sheet of paper as it emerged, hanging on every word of the conversation. Horn had asked, more than once, who hired Morten to kill Victor Steiner-Davion. That question had gotten him nowhere; it was possible that Morten would never intentionally reveal that information while he was alive. Since that highway was closed down, Horn was working through side roads, and some of them were turning out to be profitable. But, increasingly, Jonah didn’t like what he was reading.

  HORN: And no one smelled anything funny? You can just bribe a Knight of the Sphere without anyone blinking?

  MORTEN: How would anyone find out? Who’s going to tell them? The Knight who got the bribe? Or the Knight who put me on the case in the first place? They’re the ones most interested in getting it done. And when you have two Knights helping you, believe me, getting things done is a lot easie
r.

  One of the Knights Morten was talking about was Gareth Sinclair. According to Morten’s story, that’s how the situation on Ryde was resolved—a simple, though large, bribe. And it had been set up by Sinclair.

  What worried Jonah even more was an earlier exchange, back when Morten was feeling feistier.

  MORTEN: This is it. This is the end for you, buddy. You have no idea who I have behind me. Do you know what they’re going to do to you? Hell, I’ve got a whole army of people, far more powerful than you, that will take care of me. And one of them just became a Paladin. Do you know what they’re going to do to you?

  Jonah was fairly certain Morten wasn’t referring to Janella Lakewood.

  There was, of course, a question about Morten’s credibility. This was a man who, by his own admission, had used underhanded or deceitful means repeatedly to accomplish his missions. He knew how to get people to believe what he wanted. Horn was a skilled interrogator, and he was pushing Morten hard, but there was no guarantee Morten was being completely honest. He still might be playing an angle.

  Another sheet emerged from the printer.

  HORN: Then why do you keep working for people with Founder’s Movement sympathies?

  MORTEN: Coincidence, I guess. I work a lot through references, and people who like me aren’t going to refer me to their political enemies. I got started with someone with serious Founder’s Movement tendencies, so that’s where I’ve worked most of the time. I don’t care much one way or the other. But guys like Mallowes and Sinclair see me do good things for the Founder’s Movement, and they think I sympathize, so they keep using me.

  Sinclair had Founder’s Movement sympathies? Jonah stared hard at the recent printout, as if his gaze could rearrange the words on the page. That didn’t sound right.

  But Mallowes was firmly in the Founder’s Movement camp. And Mallowes was Sinclair’s sponsor. He’d worked hard to set up the training program on Skye, and he’d gotten a bright young man of an influential family into the program right away. Certainly enough to make that man feel a debt to his benefactor.