Angelmass

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 participants 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 muffled 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 button.

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, ru

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 bloody coat and her medic's tunic. A minute later, they were out in the street.

Hanan was waiting for them around the corner in a line car. "Now, that was a masterpiece," he said with a grin as the two of them piled into the line car with him. "You know, Chandris, you have the makings of one of the all-time greats."

"I'll stick with the quiet life, thanks," she said. "What did you write in those letters, anyway?"

"Trade secret," he said. The grin was still in place, but as Chandris looked closely at him she could see the weariness setting in as the adrenaline-driven thrill of the morning's events faded away. The weariness, and the pain he'd been trying so hard to hide. "So, Jereko. Where should we drop you off?"

"The Gazelle," Kosta told him. "It should be ready to fly by now, right?"

"Right," Hanan said, frowning. "You realize, of course, that's the obvious place for them to start once they sort out the mess upstairs."

"Let's hope they think it's too obvious," Kosta said firmly. "But either way, the Gazelle it is."

He looked at Chandris. "I've got some experiments to run."

The sprinklers had been shut down and the more hysterical participants hustled out, but the scene was still one of chaos when Forsythe arrived.

"What happened here?" he demanded.

In that first flurry of responses he got five different answers, all of them mutually contradictory, none of them making much sense. But through it all, one fact became clear as a winter morning.

Kosta was gone.

Slowly, crunching through scattered papers and desktop equipment, he crossed the room toward his open office door, his feet making unpleasant noises as they squished through the waterlogged carpet.

"When did this happen?" he asked the soaked office manager.

"Not fifteen minutes ago, High Senator," the manager said. He looked remorseful, embarrassed, and furious all at the same time. "This man called claiming to be—"

"Thank you, I heard," Forsythe said, dismissing the man with a curt wave of his hand. Stepping into his office, he gazed at the empty room, the weight of the gun hidden beneath his jacket tugging at his soul like a lump of frozen guilt.

The gun he had brought to use on Kosta. A gun with which he'd pla

What in the world had he been thinking of?

He shook his head, wondering what had happened to him. His private refusal to accept an angel in the first place had been on purely moral and ethical grounds. Or so he had thought. And now, to conceal that decision, he'd been prepared to commit murder.