There was no way he could conceal it. No way he could even bring it down to his word against Kosta's. Ronyon knew all about the scheme; and despite the pains Forsythe had taken to rationalize it for the big man, none of that would do any good once the questioning began. Ronyon was too honest, and too simple, to make any excuses or fabrications or spins. He would simply and straightforwardly tell the truth.

What would the people of Seraph think when they found out? What would Pirbazari think, and all the EmDef officers and troops still laboring out there in the night?

Unfortunately, he knew full well what they would think. Once, months ago, such a revelation would have meant the instant end of Forsythe's career. Now, here, the consequences would be far worse.

Because no matter what he ordered the people of Seraph to do now, it would be seen as nothing more than the self-serving manipulation of a corrupt politician. Surrender without a fight? He'd been bribed by the Pax to deliver an undamaged Empyreal world. Fight to the last man and ship? He'd been bribed to waste EmDef resources by throwing them uselessly against an obviously invincible Pax warship. Either way, the issue would be plunged into uncertainty and confusion, generating suspicion and hostility toward all their leaders.

And no matter when Seraph surrendered, before battle or afterwards, that same suspicion would likely spill over into the creation of a hundred different guerrilla units. Angry men and women would turn their anger and shame at Forsythe toward their occupiers, spilling more and more blood, until even the Pax declared Seraph not worth the trouble and destroyed it.

All that, because Kosta had somehow learned his secret.

Or rather, all that if Forsythe permitted him to reveal it.

The greatest good for the greatest number, the ancient measuring stick whispered through his mind. If Kosta had been a threat to Forsythe alone, it would be different. Forsythe had made his decision, and he was willing to face the consequences of his actions. If there was one thing his father had taught him, it was that.

But it wasn't only himself on the line here. Kosta had become a threat to all the people of Seraph, and of the Empyrean. The people Forsythe had sworn to protect.

And as an admitted Pax spy in time of war, Kosta had already forfeited his life.

From the direction of his office came the sound of gentle chimes as his father's old antique-style clock marked the three o'clock hour. It would be easy enough, Forsythe realized, the thoughts seeming as distant as if they were coming from someone else's mind. He would go to the Government Building at nine, as he'd told Pirbazari and Ronyon he would. He would go in alone to interrogate Kosta, with Pirbazari's spare gun tucked away out of sight beneath his jacket. A startled shout, an order to keep back, a single shot, and it would be over. The outer work area would be buzzing with clerks and junior officials at that hour, all of them ready to testify afterward as to what they'd heard.

And maybe Forsythe would get lucky. Maybe Kosta would try to jump him when he came in. It would certainly make the whole thing easier.

Wearily, he got to his feet and trudged aft to try to catch a few hours of sleep. By 9:05, he told himself, it would be all over. Kosta would be silenced, and he would be able to face the incoming Komitadji with a clear mind. The greatest good, for the greatest number.

On his way to his stateroom he drained the rest of his drink. It still had no taste.

CHAPTER 40.

"Just relax, girl," Hanan advised, huffing a bit as he cleared the last of the fifteen steps and headed toward the main Government Building entrance, tapping the tip of his furled umbrella rhythmically against the marble as he walked. "You know the drill, and you've got all that native talent ready to call on. It's going to work just fine."

"I hope so," Chandris muttered, throwing a quick look at him as she got a couple of paces ahead and reached for the door handle. It wasn't Hanan's scheme she was worried about, in point of fact, but Hanan himself. Despite his loud and insistent claims that he was quite adequate to this little jaunt, she could tell that every step was sending a jolt of pain through him.

But you would never tell it from listening to him talk. "It'll be fine," he repeated soothingly. "Provided you got the names straight when you looked at the directory, it should go smooth as slippies. Ten minutes, tops, and it'll all be over."

Chandris hunched her shoulders beneath the unaccustomed weight of the short but heavy overcoat she was wearing. "Okay," she said. "If you say so."

"I say so," he said. "Just relax."

They stepped through the door and crossed to the receptionist's desk. "May I help you?" the middle-aged woman seated there asked.

"I certainly hope so," Hanan said gravely, handing her the elaborate business card Chandris and Ornina had designed and printed aboard the Gazelle two hours ago. "I'm Dr. Gridley Fowler, psychiatrist; this is my a.s.sistant Jacyntha Thinne. We need to see Office Manager Cimtrask immediately in Supervisor Dahmad's office."

"Ah... certainly," the receptionist said, looking taken aback as she focused on the card. "Let me call Mr. Cimtrask and-"

"Immediately, my good woman, immediately," Hanan insisted, stepping past her desk and striding toward the door leading into the main office area of the building.

He got three steps before the receptionist seemed to realize what he was doing. "Wait a minute," she said, swiveling around in her chair. "I have to call you in-" "Supervisor Dahmad's office," Hanan called over his shoulder, pointing imperiously back toward her with his umbrella. "Immediately."

"But-"

Her protest was lost as Hanan pushed open the door and strode through. Chandris was right behind him.

"That worked," Hanan muttered as they headed down the corridor. "Which way?"

"Elevator's over there," Chandris said, nodding ahead. "We want the fifth floor."

"Dahmad?"

"Second floor," she told him. "We ought to miss Cimtrask just fine."

"Let's make sure," Hanan said, slowing his pace. "We don't want to b.u.mp into him coming down while we're going up."

They made a slightly more leisurely approach to the elevator and pushed the call b.u.t.ton. The doors opened, revealing an unoccupied car, and they stepped in. Chandris touched the fifth floor b.u.t.ton, and they were on their way.

In the silence of the car, she could hear the faint sounds of scratching and one or two tiny and very indignant squeaks. It's a normal chop and hop, she told herself firmly. It's not going to go boff on us and fall apart. It's not. Taking a deep breath, she set herself into her role.

Not surprisingly, Forsythe's office complex was considerably more lively than it had been the previous night. Ronyon was nowhere in sight, but the two guards were still on duty across the room. Two different guards, that is; there must have been a shift change sometime in the past few hours. That was good-the last thing they wanted right now was for someone to recognize her. Pulling open the door, Chandris held it as Hanan marched through, once again every bit the serious, overbearing, and rather obnoxious Dr. Gridley Fowler.

There was a receptionist seated at the desk just inside the door, working her way through a neat stack of mail. Hanan stepped to the desk and planted himself squarely in front of it. "I'm Dr. Fowler," he announced himself, tapping his umbrella tip on the floor for emphasis. As the receptionist looked up, he glanced down at the floor beside her and bent over. With her view blocked by the desk, he let a thick envelope slide out of his sleeve onto the floor and immediately picked it up. "Here-you dropped this," he added, straightening and tossing the envelope casually beside the stack of mail. "I have an urgent and immediate appointment with Mr. Cimtrask. Kindly direct me to his desk."

The receptionist blinked. "Mr. Cimtrask isn't here," she said, sounding perplexed. "He understood that he was to meet you in Supervisor Dahmad's office."

"In Supervisor-?" Hanan sputtered under his breath. "That ninny of a receptionist got it wrong. Mr.

Cimtrask and Supervisor Dahmad were both supposed to meet me here. Get them back."

The receptionist's face set into hard lines. "Sir-"

Chandris didn't wait to hear the rest of the argument, which she was pretty sure Hanan would win anyway. Slipping around behind him, she crossed to a temporarily vacant desk and surrept.i.tiously slid an envelope of her own from her sleeve onto it. She glanced at the nameplate-the man's name was Bulunga-and pa.s.sed it by, heading for an older man scowling at his computer a few desks away. His nameplate, she saw, identified him as a Mr. Samak, Agricultural Affairs. "Excuse me?" she said hesitantly.

He looked up from his work with clear annoyance. "Yes?" he demanded brusquely.

"I've got a letter for you, Mr. Samak," she said, producing another envelope from the side pocket of her overcoat and handing it to him.

He shifted his scowl to the envelope. "There's no return address," he said. "No official markings. Where did it come from?"

Chandris spread her hands. "Don't look at me," she protested. "I'm just a page temp-I don't know anything. I didn't even know where to deliver it until he told me."

"He gave you my name?"

"How else would I have known?" Chandris countered patiently. "There's no address on it, either. He just pointed me to the door, gave me your name, and told me to deliver it."

"So it was someone already in the building?" Samak asked, peering suspiciously at the envelope. A man without much humor, Chandris decided, who had likely been on the receiving end of other practical jokes through the years. Her instincts had played her right; she'd picked the perfect target. "What did he look like?"

"Oh, gee, I don't know," Chandris said, shifting around far enough to glance behind her. Mr. Bulunga was back at his desk now, a slight frown on his face as he opened the envelope she'd left for him. "He had short dark hair, dark eyes, and a sort of round face," she continued, describing Bulunga as accurately as she could without being too obvious about it. "He had on a dark-blue cutback jacket with a gray scarf. Some kind of red pattern on the scarf, I think, but I don't remember what it was."

"Hmm," Samak rumbled, slitting open the envelope with a paper knife. "Very well. You may go."

"Yes, sir," Chandris said humbly, backing away. Picking up a stack of papers from another unoccupied desk as she pa.s.sed it, she continued to move away, pretending to study the papers as she waited for the fireworks to begin.

It didn't take long. Samak's scowl grew deeper as he read through the letter Hanan had crafted, and his face was starting to turn an ominous shade of red. Four desks away, Bulunga was undergoing a similar transformation, only in his case it was from harried distraction to open-mouthed astonishment as his contracting grip made crumpled finger marks on the edges of his letter.

Samak fired the first shot. His darting eyes fixed on Bulunga; and then he was out of his chair, striding over to the other's desk. "Did you send me this?" he demanded, shoving the letter under Bulunga's nose.

To Chandris, Bulunga had the look of someone who was normally fairly easygoing. At the moment, with his own letter half crumpled in front of him, he wasn't in an easygoing mood. "Get that out of my face," he growled, glaring up at the other. "What in h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"Gray scarf with a red pattern," Samak said accusingly, hooking a finger under the edge of Bulunga's scarf and flipping it out of his jacket. "It was you, all right."

"I don't know what in stux you're talking about," Bulunga snapped, s.n.a.t.c.hing his scarf back out of Samak's hand and standing up so abruptly that the movement sent his chair rolling back to crash into the desk behind him. "But while we're on the subject of letters, what is this?" he snarled, waving his paper at Samak.

"What in the name of holiness is going on?" a man in a neat gray suit muttered from a nearby desk.

Chandris glanced at his nameplate: Wojohowitz. "I was afraid this would happen," she said to him, letting her voice tremble a little. "That man-Mr. Samak-is an escaped lunatic."

"Samak?" Wojohowitz gasped disbelievingly. "But he's worked here for-well, nearly five years."

"That's his pattern," Chandris said, raising her voice just enough for Wojohowitz to hear her over the rising volume of the argument. Samak and Bulunga were close to blows now, from the looks of them, and the whole office had stopped dead in its tracks as they watched the show in stunned fascination. "He hides out somewhere for awhile, looking perfectly normal. And then, quite suddenly, he goes berserk."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wojohowitz glance toward the two guards. "Somebody ought to do something," he said. "Why doesn't somebody do something?"

"We're waiting for the proper authorities," Chandris told him. Across the room, she could see Hanan whispering conspiratorily to another of the belligerents' shocked officemates. Weaving a similar story; only in his version, it would be Bulunga, not Samak, who was the escaped madman. Hanan glanced up, caught her eye-"Unless," Chandris added. "-yes. You go talk to them."

"Me?" Wojohowitz looked like she had just suggested he go swimming with crocodiles. "You must be joking."

"I'm a psychiatrist, Mr. Wojohowitz," she reminded him severely. "I never joke. You're one of his colleagues, one of the few people he trusts and looks up to. You're someone he'll listen to."

"No, no," Wojohowitz protested. "Not me. I mean, he hardly ever even talks to me."

"Don't argue," Chandris said sternly. "I know this man; and whether you realize it or not, he respects you. Go on-talk to him. He'll yell at you-he yells at everyone when he's like this. But trust me, he'll be listening."

"But-"

"Either you go-right now-or we have to wait for the authorities," Chandris told him. "He won't listen to them like he would to you, and they'll probably have to use physical force or even gas to subdue him. You want that to happen just because you're not willing to be a hero?"

She wasn't sure whether it was the thought of gas in his nice neat office or the magic word hero that had gotten to him. But one of them clearly had. Squaring his shoulders, Wojohowitz pushed back his chair and got to his feet. "Okay," he said. "You're the psychiatrist."

He strode toward the argument. At the same time, from the other side of the room, Hanan's chosen pigeon nodded his head in sudden decision and also started into the fray.

"What's going on here?" a voice boomed, loud enough to be heard even over the screaming from the middle of the room. There, standing just inside the door, was a white-haired man with the look of authority pasted all over him. Office Manager Cimtrask, undoubtedly, returned from his wild-snipe chase at Supervisor Dahmad's office.

Hanan was ready, stepping to Cimtrask's side even as the other started forward, taking his arm and starting to talk urgently to him in an undertone. Meanwhile, the argument in center stage, now expanded to a foursome, carried on without any of the partic.i.p.ants paying Cimtrask the slightest notice.

And things were starting to come to a boil. Backing up all the way to the wall, Chandris sidled along to a position near the two guards still standing outside Forsythe's office door. Like everyone else in the room, they were watching the gathering storm with growing apprehension. One more good nudge...

At the doorway, Cimtrask angrily threw off Hanan's arm and stomped toward the fight. Hanan slapped him encouragingly on the back as he waded in, then caught Chandris's eye again and nodded.

Chandris took a long step to the nearest of the guards and clutched at his arm. "Watch out," she hissed. "That man in the gray suit-Wojohowitz-he said he has a knife! He said if they didn't shut up he was going to use it."

And right on cue, Cimtrask reached the argument and grabbed Samak's arm, half turning around as he did so.

Giving the guards a perfect profile view of the knife hilt Hanan had stuck to the back of his jacket.

The guard beside Chandris swore. Throwing off her hand, he charged forward. The other guard already had his phone out and had punched the emergency number. "Medical emergency-Suite 501," he barked. The first guard reached Cimtrask, spun him around- And with a m.u.f.fled crack, the smoke bomb inside the envelope Hanan had set on the receptionist's desk went off, blowing a pillar of dense white smoke toward the ceiling.

Someone screamed. The room's fire-suppression system had a more practical reaction: as the smoke cloud flattened out along the ceiling, the sprinklers went on.

The room dissolved into a chaos of shouts and screams and a panic-driven stampede for the door. The second guard started forward, shouting for everyone to remain calm. "Quickly," Hanan shouted, barely audible over the noise as he thrust his umbrella into the receptionist's hands. "Here-protect your desk!"

Automatically, she took it. Automatically, she pointed it toward the misty rain falling onto her precious papers and pushed the release b.u.t.ton.

And let out a scream that momentarily drowned out the entire room as four small, brightly colored lizards fell out of the umbrella and scampered in different directions across the floor.

Chandris didn't wait to see any more. Stepping to Forsythe's office door, she opened it and slipped inside.

She nearly ran over Kosta in the process. He was standing just to the side of the door, listening to the noise outside his prison with bewildered nervousness. "Chandris!" he exclaimed as she closed the door to a crack behind her and wedged it into place with the tip of her shoe. "What's going on?"

"We're breaking you out," she told him, pulling off her overcoat. "You have anything you need to grab?"

"No," he said, his eyes widening in surprise at the medic's tunic she was wearing underneath. "What in-?"

"We've got medics coming, and rumors of a knife fight out there," she said. She turned the coat inside out, displaying the bright red bloodstain on the other side. "You're one of the victims. Put it on."

"I don't believe this," he said, shaking his head as he slipped on the coat. "How in the name of the laughing fates did you manage this?"

"I signed aboard a ship with a lunatic practical joker for captain," she said, running a quick eye over him and then pulling the door open. "Remember, you've been knifed."

They left the office, Chandris with a supporting arm around his waist, Kosta clutching at his side over the bloodstain as he shuffled along like someone halfway into shock. The pandemonium in the outer area hadn't diminished in the slightest; in fact, now that a couple more security men and three medics had arrived, it was that much worse. Chandris led the way around the back of the room toward the door, keeping them as far out of the swirling turmoil as she could.

They were nearly there when one of the medics glanced over and saw them. "I've got this one,"

Chandris shouted to him. "The rest are in the office back there. Hurry!"

He nodded, the movement shaking water off his forehead. Grabbing one of his fellow medics, he started bulling his way through the crowd. Chandris and Kosta reached the door and slipped out.

In the stairway they ditched Kosta's b.l.o.o.d.y coat and her medic's tunic. A minute later, they were out in the street.