Regenesis

“Damn Ya

Suddenly a handful of things clicked into place, logic, motive. Jordan wasn’t a fool. He was a man who’d been in a hard, hard spot when the first Ari died–and if he’d quarreled bitterly with Ariane Emory, he’d been at outright war with the Nyes, particularly Giraud. “I’ll present that case,” Justin said. “Honestly I will.”

“You don’t have to,” Jordan said, and drank off the melt in his glass. “Her faithful shadow’s out there, isn’t he, and we’re bugged as all hell. They know what I said. They can weigh it for what it’s worth or call me a liar.”

Justin shrugged. Drew in a breath and took a chance. “I might take that drink, Dad.”

“Fix it yourself.” Jordan waved his glass toward the bar, toward him. “Fix me another while you’re at it.”

“I’ll do it,” Grant said, and got up and took the glass with him.

“Could ask Florian in,” Jordan muttered. “Damn spook. He’s getting to look like the first Florian. Getting to act like him, too.”

“He wouldn’t come in,” Justin said. He didn’t want the excuse of the intrusion. “And he won’t drink on duty. But don’t be surprised to see Security in your hallway hereafter. They’re upset, two murders on opposite sides of the world, no explanations, and both of us are at risk.”

“Just one of those little puzzles Security loves, isn’t it? And we’re two of their favorite subjects.”

Grant brought Jordan and him their drinks, and went back to the bar with Paul’s empty glass.

“Personally, I’m still glad Security’s out there,” Justin said, after a first sip. “I don’t want to be getting a midnight call about you.”

“Oh, just look at us. We’re caring about each other. Heartwarming.”

Too easy to come back in sarcastic kind. Jordan invited it, tried to turn everything to vinegar. Justin took another sip from his glass. “Mirror into mirror. We’re too apt to fight. But let’s face it, I have a certain position, one that I fought for in Giraud Nye’s time. He didn’t like me much. Didn’t like you, ergo didn’t like me, and I paid for it.”

“Sorry.” The tone wasn’t.

“Not your fault, particularly. The Nyes knew damned well you were i

“They put us under pressure and bugged the place,” Jordan said, “and we all knew it. Iwas i

BOOK THREE Section 2 Chapter iv

JUNE 12, 2424

0321H

“Interesting comment,” Florian said somberly, when he and Catlin reviewed the record, with Marco and Wes in the room. “If it’s true about the card, possibly someone in ReseuneSec was trying to draw a wrong action out of Warrick. Or maybe it had, as he said, completely different motives, and came from some source that ought not to be inside these walls.”

“Pursue it,” Catlin said. She looked tired. None of them had gotten a great deal of sleep this night.

But they had gotten Justin and Grant home uncontaminated, at least in the sense of poison and deepteach drugs. Justin and Grant were, by now, sleeping it off, sera herself had managed to get some late sleep, after a two in the morning call to Ya

It was, to all appearances, death by catastrophic heart failure, in Thieu’s case–autopsy had yet to determine more specifics. It was even possible it was naturaldeath, a body which had ceased to renew itself, arteries and veins and cardiac tissue losing their prolonged youthful character, in the sort of fairly rapid decline that attended rejuv failure. It didn’t take much to tip a fragile body off the edge. Somebody might have applied that pressure.

The force, however, that had torn a sealed window out of its mount and sent Sandur Patil ten stories to the roof of an adjacent cooling tower–that was a plainly hostile action, on the shockwave of a grenade hand‑launcher. Sniffers, applied within the hour in the corridor and lifts, had turned up molecular evidence that had yet to match up with anyone in files, which meant the perpetrator had either confounded the scene with a puffer, available, some sophisticated ones quite expensively so, in Novgorod’s CIT underworld. That, or whoever had so spectacularly done in Patil was a novice with a hitherto clean record, and thus not on file. They could run the sniffer data and get an ID of everybody who’d been near that apartment…but on the grounds of the heavy firepower involved, beyond most novices, Florian personally bet on a puffer in use, specifically designed to foil a sniffer and confuse the scene. That was going to take the chemists time to sort out. The launcher, however–that wasn’t a short‑range weapon. It wasn’t the sort of thing a professional took to a quiet assassination. Whoever had done this was making a statement.

In the meanwhile–their whole staff lost sleep.

“No shortage of Paxer talent to produce a bogus card,” Wes said. “Somebody could have done it off any letter she sent with her letterhead.”

“ReseuneSec calls it clean,” Catlin said. “Electronically speaking clean, nanistically clean. No microprint in the typeface, so it was a private printer, but definitely with Planys microtags. That indicates only that the paper was produced to be used in Planys. Not that it was. The printer site could be anywhere.”