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Ezr reached out from his blankets and stuck a finger in his ear, pushing the tiny localizer deeper. "Say again? Are you still there?"
bzzt"I'm here. About Reynolt: She's deadly. One way or another, she must be removed."
"Kill her?" The words caught in Ezr's throat. For all he that he hated Nau and Brughel and the whole system of Focus, he didn't hate A
"I hope not! Maybe...if Nau would just take the bait on the localizers, if he would just start using them in Hammerfest. Then we'd be as safe over there as we are here. If that happens before her zips figure out that it's a trap..."
"But the whole point of the delay was to give her time to study the localizers."
"Yeah. Nau is no fool. Don't worry. I'm tracking things. If she gets too close, I'll...take care of her."
For a moment, Ezr tried to imagine what Pham might do, then forced his mind from the imaginings. Even after two thousand years, the Vinh Family still had a special place in its affection for the memory of Pham Nuwen. Ezr remembered the pictures that had been in his father's den. He remembered the stories his aunt had told him. Not all of them were in the Qeng Ho archives. That meant the stories weren't true—or else they were truly private reminiscences, what G'mama Sura and her children had really thought of Pham Nuwen. They loved him for more than founding the modern Qeng Ho, for more than being g'papa to all the Vinh Families. But some of the stories showed a hard side to the man.
Ezr opened his eyes, looked quietly around the darkened room. Vague night-gleams lit his fatigues floating in the closet sack, showed the delitesse still sitting uneaten on his desk. Reality. "What can you really do with the localizers, Pham?"
Silence. Faraway buzzing. "What can I do? Well, Vinh, I can't kill with them...not directly. But they are good for more than this crummy audio link. It takes practice; there are tricks you have to see." Long pause. "Hell, you need to learn 'em. There could be times when I'm out of link, and they're the only things that can save your cover. We should get together in person—"
"Huh? Face-to-face? How?" Dozens, maybe hundreds of times he and Pham Nuwen had plotted as they did tonight, like prisoners tapping anonymously on dungeon walls. In public, they saw less of each other than in the early Watches. Nuwen had said that Ezr just wasn't good enough at controlling his eyes and body language, that the snoops would guess too much. Now—
"Here in the temp, Brughel and his zipheads are depending on the localizers. There are places 'tween the balloon hulls where some of their old cameras have died. If we run into each other there, they'll have nothing to contradict what I feed them through the localizers. The problem is, I'm sure the snoops rely on statistics as much as anything. Once upon a time I ran a fleet security department, like Ritser's except a bit more mellow. I had programs that highlighted suspicious behavior—who was out of sight when, unusual conversations, equipment failures. It worked pretty well, even when I couldn't catch the bad guys red-handed. Zipheads plus computers should be a thousand times better. I bet they have stat traces extending back to the begi
Lord of Trade."But we could get away with almost anything!" Wherever the Emergents depended on Qeng Ho localizers.
"Maybe. Once. Curb the impulse." Even in the buzzing speech, Ezr could tell that Pham was chuckling.
"When can we meet?"
"Sometime that minimizes the effect on Ritser's merry analysts. Let's see...I'm going off-Watch in less than two hundred Ksec. I'll be partway through a Watch the next time you are on. I'll fix things so we can do it right after that."
Ezr sighed.Half a year of lifetime away. But not as far away as some things; it would do.
THIRTY-FOUR
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The vines and flowers still remained, even though Hunte had been off-Watch for almost two years.
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