Rogue(95)

Once in the car, I told Silver, “Ideally, we wrap this up and they forget about me entirely.”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “That leaves them without an enforcer.”

“And without a problem.”

“I’m not positive Timurhin’s that logical.”

“Maybe. He’s got limited intel on us, though.”

“He might have gotten something from Randall.”

That put shivers through me, half of them because I’d forgotten to account for that.

“Change everything,” I said. “Clothes, IDs, the works. Assume they got some DNA from that meal.”

“I already did,” she said. “That’s part of why I’m surprised you agreed to meet in person.”

“It was a risk, but I think we came out ahead. He’s cut off again and they’ll throw any intel they get at us, I hope.”

“Yeah,” she said. “They may have figured you were a threat and be setting you both up.”

“That’s sort of what I want,” I said with a smile. If only I could believe it.

“Can you really get paid twice for the same job?” she asked.

“I know someone who got paid three times for the same job. But I only care about cutting Randall off from resources.”

Still, after a convoluted detour around the city and back to the house, a check of the sensors and boobytraps, and picking up a couple of pistols to hold in my lap, I felt a bit better.

The tactical summary, again, was that Randall had lost his primary underwriter and employer and now had to scrabble. He’d lost his primary bank account. He had intelligence agencies in three major systems looking for him. He had me after him. He was panicky and insecure. He’d thrown blocks at me and missed. We were closing in inexorably, and he had few options left.

Realistically, if someone else bagged him, I didn’t care. It would be easier for me, morally. An accident wasn’t desirable, though, because it wouldn’t send enough of a message, and dammit, as much as I hated the notion of sending messages through killing people, this time it probably was justified, one on one. I knew Naumann would feel validated by it, though.

Having done all this, I pondered what else I could do to hinder Randall. I didn’t want too much publicity. That would be bad for us as well. If I could damage his reputation further, by hindering more hits . . . but that assumed we didn’t end this.

Silver interrupted my haze.

“I’ve got a DNA match and image!” she almost shouted.

Antigravity exists. I was two meters above the bed in a microsecond.

“Where?” I called back as I landed and ran over.

“Port. Marquardt came through with what we provided.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Already departed. It took some time to get sorted through the system.”

I remembered the trouble we’d had on Caledonia. Here, they’d actually had people scanning the images of every passenger the last two weeks.

Yeah, Randall had pronged the dog by getting flashy.

“Departed where?”

“He lifted ten hours ago, could be on a ship or deep space shuttle now. Marquardt wants to know if he should alert the ships.”

“Sweet gods, no. He’ll fight like a wounded leopard. Just tell us where the hell he’s going.”

She dove in with mic, keypad, optical trackers. I’m fast, but she fairly flew, with several screens at once and audio. She sat there and pulled data, made notes, called Marquardt’s office, deleted, tagged. It was most of an hour before she turned and said, “Ninety-five percent chance of Earth, five percent of Mtali.”

That was so insane I had to ask her, “Say again.”

“Ninety-five percent Earth, five percent Mtali.”

My first thought was that he was desperate if he was going to Earth. If IDed there, he’d be ripped to pieces. Of course, so would I.

Had he found another patron with a lot of money? Or was he hoping to use the massive government system to shield himself from me? Was he suicidal and trying to take me with him?

We’d missed the launch, but there were a lot of ships for Earth. That wasn’t a problem. I knew Earth, had money, had backup. I also found I had a neurotic fear of going there. They didn’t know my name, but I was the most hated man in the world’s history. If discovered, I’d be lucky to just be ripped to pieces.

“What’s your deduction based on?”

“He was there just in time to board an Earth ship. There was a Mtali ship that left about two hundred seconds after they opened the hatch on the shuttle. At a sprint, he might have made that one, but there’s no report of anyone doing a breakneck rush through the station, and no images on file. The Earth ship is well en route now.”