David Weber - Torch of Freedom

"Which word in 'she's my woman' does anybody in this bar have trouble understanding?" the gunman asked. He still sounded thoroughly bored.

"Jesus H. Christ," said Jurgen Dusek. "Run it again, Chuanli."

The crime boss watched the recording three times over. Each time looking to see . . . anything that would make that gunman seem like a human being. Or even a normal sociopath.

Nothing.

After watching the recording four times, though, Dusek understood what had happened. It wasn't that McRae was some sort of "fast gun." True, he'd figured out a way to get the pistol into his hand without anyone spotting it, and then he'd moved quickly and surely, with not a single wasted motion. But any man well trained, familiar with weapons and in good condition could have done the same.

No, the secret was mental. This guy was one of those very rare people who could kill at the proverbial drop of the hat. He hadn't needed the stages of emotional escalation that even hardened thugs required, as quickly as those stages might pass. With him, everything had been instantaneous. Recognition of threat, calculation that the threat was best handled ruthlessly, start the killing.

"Talk about a hardcase," he muttered. "No wonder Saint-Just tagged him. You talk to him afterward?"

"Yeah. I waited a bit, you understand. It took the barkeeps a while to clean everything up anyway. The three guys he shot weren't any complication. The working arrangement they had with Jozef was just providing him with occasional muscle."

Jozef Ortega was no more sentimental than any under-boss. He worked for Jurgen anyway. Chuanli had been waiting nearby and had been called in by the barkeeps as soon as the fight was over. He could have been there in thirty or forty seconds, but he stretched it out to five minutes. McRae would probably figure out the whole thing had been a setup, but there was no reason to make it obvious. That might even be a little dangerous.

The rest would have been routine. Clean up the place, quietly threaten whatever patrons—probably none—might have an inclination to shoot their mouths off, and then pitch the three corpses into the garbage disintegrator of the restaurant next door. Dusek owned the restaurant as well as the Rhodesian, and he'd provided it with a top-of-the-line disintegrator. And then paid bribes to the police and the sanitation department to have all the recorders and detectors disabled. Nobody except the people involved would ever know what happened to those bodies.

"Give Jozef a payoff for lost services from his three guys. Ex-guys. Just to keep him from having hard feelings."

Chuanli nodded. "And McRae?"

"Is he willing to talk further? Or is he holding a grudge?"

"Yeah, sure. Cold-blooded killer be damned, boss. He probably figured out we set it all up, but it's not like he suffered any damages. He's got to eat like anyone else—not to mention keeping that big blonde happy. And for that he needs to get some work."

Dusek pursed his lips. The remaining issue that had to be considered was whether this McRae fellow was actually an agent for . . .

It wouldn't be any government agency or corporate security service. Not, at least, of any government or corporations Dusek was familiar with. This guy was just plain too murderous.

But that still left the Ballroom as a possibility. Not likely, but it couldn't be ruled out altogether. Dusek had no loyalty to Mesa, but he also wasn't a fool. This planet was his place of business—a very profitable one, too—and keeping that business up and running required him to avoid pissing off the powers-that-were.

A triple killing, when the dead men were thugs themselves and had no important patrons or allies, wouldn't concern the Mesan authorities. Not one that took place in this district. But if there was any Ballroom connection, the official indifference would end abruptly. Twice in his life, Jurgen had seen what happened when Mesa took off the gloves and really went after someone in the seccy districts. "Due process" and "reasonable force" were meaningless noises. They'd think nothing of leveling entire city blocks and butchering everyone in them, just to kill one person they were after.

That said . . .

Dusek figured he could probably ignore the problem, as long as Inez Cloutier hired McRae and got him off the planet quickly. It really wasn't likely, after all, that a former inner circle StateSec person would have anything to do with the Ballroom. True, the Havenites had always been opposed to genetic slavery. But so what? The one thing every former StateSec whom Dusek had ever encountered had in common was that they were mercenaries. And what did the Ballroom have to offer them?

"So what do you want to do with McRae?" asked Chuanli.

Dusek made his decision. "Just have somebody keep track of him. It doesn't have to be any sort of elaborate tailing operation, Chuanli. That costs real money. Just somebody keeping an eye on his lodgings. Letting us now when he leaves, when he comes back, his daily routine."

"Can't find out where he goes without tailing him, boss."

"Who the hell cares where he goes? We're not in the least bit interested in this guy, Chuanli. He's bad news. A full-bore psychopath—and good at it. The sooner he's off the planet, the better. We just want to turn a nice profit getting him off, that's all. For that, we don't need to know anything we don't know already. He's legitimately StateSec, was all that mattered. Good enough for this market."

Jack McBryde sat in his comfortable office, watching the smart wall opposite his desk, and worried.

The wall was configured to show bird's-eye views from the ceiling-mounted security pickups scattered throughout the facility for which he held primary responsibility. From those views, an uninformed observer would never have guessed that the entire Gamma Center was buried under better than fifty meters of the planet Mesa's dirt and rock. Actually, it was buried under the foundations of one of the commercial-zoned towers which fringed the outskirts of Green Pines, as well. Its original construction had been handily concealed by all the other activity involved in building Green Pines in the first place, and it was far enough out from the residential district that it had no "fulltime" neighbors to notice anything peculiar about it. Even better, perhaps, the fact that the tower above it was packed with specialty shops, financial offices, medical service providers, and better than a dozen various government and corporate offices provided ample cover for the comings and goings of the Center's seven hundred-odd scientists, engineers, and administrators and the security people responsible for keeping an eye on them.

The Alignment, however, had learned long ago that a troglodyte existence wasn't conducive to getting the very best out of creative people. That was why the Center's subterranean chambers boasted surprisingly high ceilings and large, airy rooms and offices. Corridors were broader than they had to be, with their smart walls configured to provide remarkably convincing illusions of open forest glades or—on the second floor—sundrenched, white-sugar beaches. The public areas' ceilings were likewise designed to give the impression that people inside them were actually outside, but the individual researchers' work spaces and offices were configured as the interior rooms they were, since quite a few people seemed to find it difficult to concentrate their full attention on the work at hand when they were "outside." On the other hand, the decision of exactly how to configure any team's work area was left up to the team's members, and the majority of them had opted for "windows" looking out on the same scenery their public corridors afforded. Better than half had added large "skylights" whose views of the sky matched the apparent time of day of the corridors which, in turn, were coordinated with the actual time of day outside the Center.