Movement in the doorway . . . Adele's eyes flicked to the right. Markos's aide had entered the library.
"Turn around or by God I'll use this!" Bracey said. The aide raised an eyebrow in mild interrogation.
Adele looked over her shoulder. Bracey was pointing the submachine gun at her. She couldn't tell whether he thought she was too stupid to know the gun was unloaded, or whether the fool didn't know himself.
"Get him out of here or I'll kill him," Adele said quietly to the aide. She shifted both control wands into her right hand.
Bracey pulled the trigger, answering Adele's unspoken question. When nothing happened, he gave a wordless scream and gripped the weapon by the barrel to use as a club.
Adele drew her pistol. Bracey stepped back; the two men with him ducked behind piles of boxes. The more sober woman was cradling her drunken companion's head, smiling in satisfaction as she ignored whatever else might be going on in the room.
"You won't use that!" Bracey said. Adele grinned faintly.
"I wonder how many men have had that for their last words," said the aide, speaking for the first time. She crooked the index finger of her left hand toward Bracey. The submachine gun in her other hand shifted slightly.
"I'll use this," she added with her insectile smile. "Out of here now, all of you."
One of the hiding men raised his head to survey the situation. He and his companion circled their way out of the library, giving both Adele and the aide as wide a berth as possible. Bracey saw them leaving. He started after them, stumbled on a fallen book, and hurled the useless submachine gun away as he scuttled through the doorway.
The women were leaving also, wrapped in their own world. Adele dropped the pistol into her pocket and resumed her task.
"Mr. Markos noticed you weren't in the Grand Salon," the aide said. "He wanted to be sure that you were all right."
Adele continued working. "Please thank Mr. Markos for his concern," she said, "but assure him that I'm quite capable of looking after myself."
"I warned him that you were," the aide said with catlike humor, "but he didn't believe me."
Adele finished the modification. Portions of the console's software and memory could now be accessed only through her handheld unit. They no longer existed so far as an operator at the unit's integral controls were concerned.
"Good night, mistress," the aide said in her expressionless voice. "I'm sure we'll have other dealings in time."
She left the library. Her absence was like the coming of spring.
Adele got up from the console and checked to be sure her personal data unit was settled in its pocket. There was still winter in her heart.
Hogg returned from the truck's cab. Something bulged when his loose jacket hung against his beltline the wrong way. Beside them a man was hammering on a jitney's splashboard while screaming at the driver; she screamed back.
"I handed one through the panel into the back," Hogg said. "I figured the guys there, they can't see out and they're going to feel like canned meat unless they've got, you know, a good luck charm. Do you want the other one, sir?"
"No," said Daniel. He leaned against the back of the truck, trying to look as though he belonged here. His eyes scanned the broad, arched doorway into the palace. "A gun would look wrong without the proper belt and holster. You're probably better with it anyway."
Besides, he wasn't sure he'd want the weapon. If he carried a pistol he'd be wondering whether or not to use it every time there was a crisis. Lt. Daniel Leary had to think as a commander, not a gunman, if his detachment was to survive.
Alliance troops had begun to sort out the traffic jam, starting at the street entrance. They weren't trained for the job, but their brute force approach—a gun in the face and a curt order—was beginning to have an effect. Soon it might be possible to pull the van back onto the pavement and leave the gardens.
Adele had left them just under twenty-five minutes ago. Daniel didn't need to check the time: his mental clock was accurate even now when he was waiting for something that was out of his control.
Adele would need a minimum of ten minutes to reach the third-floor library without the sort of haste that would arouse attention. Ten minutes more to return. Five minutes wasn't much for whatever it was she needed to do when she got there, not really.
"Didn't sound to me like any of the shooting came from up there," Hogg said morosely, nodding his chin in the direction of the north wing of the palace. They couldn't see the end windows that served the library because the van was parked so close to the main building. "Of course, with so much shit going on it's hard to tell."
Gunfire was omnipresent in Kostroma City tonight, like the cries of nightbirds at Bantry. The sharpness of light weapons didn't travel very far, but neither was it possible even for a poacher like Hogg to be absolutely sure of the direction it came from.