Ten years ago, Quinn Taylor's world was destroyed in a moment of jealousy and vengeance: the man she loved, Seth Ladron, betrayed her in his own desperate bid to hold power in Ariston's treacherous underworld.
But Quinn is a survivor. The unique result of genetic engineering, she has survived government laboratories, vicious street gangs, prison, and the cutthroat glamor of interplanetary politics, learning from men who would use her for their own ends, honing her own abilities to become a highly sought-after professional killer. An elusive name, a wealthy recluse, a deadly beauty--Quinn keeps her real self safe, hidden under layers of mask and rumor.
Now a tempting job offer has come from Ariston City. Quinn knows Seth Ladron is long dead, but she has yet to lay his ghost to rest. She needs to see where she came from, if only to know whether she has a future....
I'm going back to Ariston, Quinn thought, sitting near the back of the shuttle and watching people shove their way down the aisle. In another hour, I'll be back in Ariston City.
All week that thought had been ambushing her at odd moments. She would be reading or brushing her hair or making small talk with other passengers on the starcruiser, and the thought would surface and she would poke at it with a mental tongue, like a child tormenting a loose tooth. Was it still sensitive? What did it feel like? How far could she push it?
It hadn't felt like much, up until now, and that had pleased her, that she could feel as indifferent about this job as any other. She had felt no anxiety about booking the trip, no trepidation about calling the hotels and thinking I am now talking to someone on Ariston for the first time in ten years. She'd had no premonitions of disaster while she helped Justin set up her cover.
Now, sitting on the orbitdock shuttle, waiting for the businessmen and vacationers to find their seats for the descent to planetside: now, at last, it felt real. There was an interesting exhilaration in the concept, a sense of triumph that bordered on arrogance. I escaped, was the thought just under the surface. I got far enough away that I can afford to come back and look down my nose at you.
Nasty, yes, but deeply gratifying. She had never claimed to be a superior moral specimen.
She didn't look very physically impressive at the moment, either, just a wiry young woman in jeans and an oversized tee-shirt, hair in a limp ponytail, no makeup. She had packed like a college student for this trip: cargo pants and scrubs, sneakers. Her passport said her name was Tabitha Morris, twenty-six, a volunteer nurse for Medicine Without Boundaries. She was coming to Ariston City to help provide free health care to the poor. The volunteer coordinator for MWB in AC had been delighted to get her application.
"I suppose you find this all very amusing," Justin had said, as he was forging her credentials.
"Just giving back to the old neighborhood," she replied.
There were a dozen or so college-age kids on the starcruiser, coming out to Ariston for an after-graduation vacation, which Quinn found privately mind-blowing. Ariston City had been something of a playground for the wealthy and powerful ten years ago, but it was a place where the privileged came to do things they shouldn't. Since she'd left, AC had become more of a resort town, a sort of edgy hotspot for adventure-seeking young idiots. Hiking, mountain climbing, hookers, drugs, gambling, snuff games--Ariston had it all.
A lot of the other passengers were visiting on business. The original colony had been a silicates-mining operation, and the older business districts had been built around computer and bio-circuitry production. A couple of the big corporations still maintained production colonies there, staffed mostly with indentured labor, but AC was big enough and populated enough that no single Terran corporation had political control.
The drug dealers reserved that privilege for themselves.
"I'm not implying you can't take care of yourself," Justin had said when he was trying to talk her out of going. "God knows I wouldn't make that mistake again. I'm just afraid you're trying to prove something to yourself--how far you've come, how tough you are, and you'll underestimate the risk."
"And I understand that," she said, even though she thought it was bullshit. "I know you're worried about me, babe, but there really isn't any more risk out there than on any other job."
"None of us does much business on Ariston," he reminded her. "Stephen ships them food and that's about it. If you get into trouble, there won't be anyone to help you."
"Justin," she said patiently, "in all the years I've been doing this--seven years, now--how often have I needed you to bail me out? Once. And I've had a lot of practice since then. I'll triple-failsafe it. I know how this town works, remember?"
She didn't say so, but she was actually looking forward to being in a place where Justin's and Zoja's networks didn't extend. She loved them both dearly, but they could be smothering, and she didn't want to feel that anyone was looking over her shoulder. She didn't think of this job in terms of proving anything. It was more like a reset button on her life. Her coming back had been inevitable since the day of her conviction; when and why were the only details that mattered.
The shuttle landed safely and the attendants began to circulate, assisting passengers out of their restraints. Quinn waited patiently for the rest of the sheep to file out in front of her, matching her pace to theirs, dragging her bag over her shoulder. She set her sunglasses on her nose as she neared the gangplank, bracing herself for the assault of heat and light, but it was the smell that got to her first.
The exhaust vents of hell should have such an aroma. She had forgotten how bad it was. Sulfur, ammonia, raw waste, fuel, exhaust and booze fought for the uppermost offense.
"Good lord, what is that smell?" another passenger exclaimed, as they stumbled down the gangplank, stunned by blistering heat and blinding sun.
That's Ariston City, my friend. Quinn chuckled to herself. And this is the fresher end of it.
Glare bounced off the backs of hundreds of ships, private E-classes and the larger H-class commercial vessels, basking in the sun, but if you looked out toward the horizon, a low haze of pollution was visible, hovering like a plague. The central docking ports were actually one of the higher points in town, and the heat of the day had made the smog curtain rise, although it would settle again as soon as the sun went down. Respiratory diseases were rampant in the poorer parts of town, between the silica dust and the lousy air.
In the distance, rusty-colored mountain peaks formed a ring, like sentinels, around the colony. Ariston City sat in a natural bowl in the land, in the center of a mineral- and metal-rich geological plate. Quinn had heard that there was an ocean to the north, but she had never seen it, and the mountains blocked most of the precipitation that might have cleansed the City.
She paused at the landing, where the gangplank met the raised passenger walk. The streets below were a seething mass of humanity and machines, woven through with ramps and railings and pocketed with maintenance pits. Dockmasters yelling, kids screaming, machines groaning; she remembered the jostle and the heat and the grime with tactile clarity. Either the nostalgia or the stench was enough to make her eyes water.
"Excuse," a voice snapped as a richly-dressed couple shoved past her on the walkway. Unconcerned, Quinn moved closer to the railing and watched them hurry ahead, carrying heavy bags and frowning as they looked around for a taxi.
Targets, she thought, flashing back to a younger, more primal mode of thinking. Then she turned her bag around so that the fastenings were next to her body. She looked like a target now. She'd have to keep that in mind.
Quinn descended the stairs from the gangplank to the street and was engulfed in a jostling ocean of humanity-street vendors, porters, taxi and rickshaw drivers, all of them trying to get the attention of the incoming passengers.
"Taxi this way, mister? Get those bags for you?"
"Eh, bonita, pretty necklace for a pretty lady! Got these cheap, anything you want!"
"Fresh filtered, straight from Persephone! Best water you get anywhere!"
She ducked and elbowed her way to the edges of the bottleneck, wrinkling her nose at the more intimate smells of unwashed bodies, but no one was going anywhere fast. Once she worked through the line at the cabstand she ran into a crowd in front of the Embassy's tariff station, where the merchants and dockmasters had to register their manifests before loading or unloading. The Embassy for Management of Planetary Resources was supposed to regulate the wealth of the colonies, to prevent too many raw goods from flooding into Earth, and to make sure the less fortunate were given opportunity to emigrate to the colonies. But like most bureaucracies, the EMPR was more adept at sustaining itself than serving the public interest.
Next to the tariff station was the Immigration Registry office, and it was even more crowded--hundreds of people, families with children, queued up like cattle, waiting for a Human Resources manager from their sponsor corporation to come along and collect them. This crowd was mostly Latino, by the look of them; Leviatech in particular liked to homogenize their production colonies as much as possible. They claimed it lessened racial tensions among the workers.
"Deniro, senorita?" a brown-faced little boy appeared at her left elbow, hand held out beseechingly. He was both a charming and a pitiful sight: big brown eyes and a gap where his permanent teeth were half grown-in, ragged and dirty. "Just a little?"
"Lo siento mucho, kid," she said. "Get lost."
He grinned like the con artist he was. "C'mon, bonita, I no have breakfast all week, and my brother, he so sick, he cough, like this--" He made an appalling hacking noise.
Quinn grinned back at him. He was so damn cute, and obvious. The slight shift of the strap across her shoulder did not surprise her in the least. She whipped her arm around almost casually, a low trolling hook that snagged a fistful of hair. The owner yelped in surprise and pain. She hauled the accomplice around in front of her, and gave him--or her; really too grubby to tell--a shove toward the decoy.
"Andale," she said. "Git. I'm too fast for you."
The one she'd grabbed looked at her balefully and rubbed his scalp, but the gap-toothed one grinned at her. "Yeah, you fast like gato, lady. But you no catch me! Vamos!" He slapped his friend and they whooped, diving into the crowd and disappearing.
She found herself smiling after him, feeling flattered for a moment that they'd taken her for a tourist, then acknowledged her as a worthy adversary. But her smile faded as she remembered the hard realities of their life. Lucky if they lived to grow up. Luckier if they didn't get forced into the flesh trade. She felt the bottom of her bag for cuts, but there didn't seem to be any.
"Welcome back to Ariston, Ms. Taylor," she murmured. "How have you been? Fine, thank you. Let us get that bag for you, Ms. Taylor...."
She stopped talking to herself long enough to wave down a cab and give the driver instructions.
The first hotel she went to was called the Excelsior, and it was on the very edge of what could be considered the safe part of the city. She paid the bored-looking clerk with cash and received a key to a dim little room on the second floor, away from the street. This was her new home base, what would serve as the residence of her volunteer-nurse-Tabitha-Morris cover. It was rather grim, with the bare cinderblock walls and the smell of dust and hot concrete inside, but it was appropriate, in more ways than one. Quinn was amused to find herself adopting a Spartan mindset, semi-consciously thinking she would live spare for the next few days, no frills, no sightseeing, minimal contact with other people. Get in, get out. You've gotten spoiled in your old age. It's still better than what you lived in before. Et cetera.
It was largely a fantasy, of course, because as soon as she got set up here, she was going to catch a cab uptown to the Royalty, which was the second-best hotel in the city. She'd tried the Wellington first but it had been booked. She had gotten used to traveling first-class over the years, enough so that staying in a rathole for a few days seemed sincere and romantic.
There was such a thing, Quinn thought, as being too self-aware. You started second-guessing yourself, wondering if the way you felt was how you really felt because no normal person would feel that way under such circumstances.
In as much as she was qualified to judge normal.
She locked the door, drew the blinds in the room, and immediately emptied her bag on the bed. Underneath the clothes and toiletries was a zippered false bottom, which she pulled out. It opened on a hinge, into a long thin storage box. It, and its contents, were entirely made of inert plastic and ceramics, invisible to metal detectors and density scanners.
Her partner Justin was, among other things, very gifted with electronics. If he didn't know how to build something, he knew whom to call. The first thing she pried out of the carry-case's foam lining was a magnetic lock with an auxiliary set of jellyfish stingers. The lock went on the doorframe, just above the knob, and the stingers went all around the door opening. If it was armed and somebody came through, they got electrocuted. A valuable sleep-aid in a city like this.
The second toy was more benign: a small tube full of little round flat discs, about the size of her thumbnail. Scattered around the room, they made a surveillance net that could be linked to her palmscreen. They told her if anyone came into the room while she was out of it. A bit superfluous, in her opinion, but she wouldn't let Justin be right about her underestimating the risks.
There were other, more prosaic things inside, most of which she never used but were fun to play with: bugs for depositing on a quarry so she could track his whereabouts; a density scanner for looking through walls; a high-powered eavesdropping antenna. Her palmscreen had a few special features, too, including a code-cracking program that could get her inside most electronically secured doors in a matter of seconds, even those that required an eye- or palm-scan. DNA sinks were still a little hard to get around, but Justin was working on that.
Thinking of Justin, she leaned across the bed to pick up the phone. She dialed the off-planet relay, which took a full five minutes first to access, then to verify that she could pay for it; then waited patiently for another three or four minutes while Justin's scrambling system bounced the call from one relay to another, obscuring his actual whereabouts. Justin's primary vocation was data brokering: gathering privileged information for high-paying clients on such diverse subjects as the price of steak on Earth, insider trading patterns on Persephone, and the voting habits of left-handed liberals on Quartz. It was very time-sensitive work, so he needed to be available to his customers at all times, but he also needed his channels to be secure. He updated his pathways every four days, which kept him about six months ahead of the EMPR's anti-espionage technology.
While she waited, she pulled the carry-case toward her and took out a small tool kit and a thin flat bundle wrapped in plastic foam. Tucked into an inner pocket of her bag were a pair of black leather gauntlets, innocuous enough until you felt the heft of them and realized there was some kind of rigid housing built into the backs and wrists. The thin packet, unwrapped, contained eight thin ceramic blades, razor-sharp and capable of piercing just about anything except armor plating.
With a pair of pliers, she set each of the blades carefully into slits in the backs of the gloves, eased them down into the latch until she felt them click. When four blades were installed into one housing, she pulled the glove on, made a fist, and used a screwdriver to tighten the catch in the housing until she felt the pull across her knuckles. She loosened her fist, tightened the catch another half-turn, and clenched her fist.
The hair-trigger let go with a light snap, and the blades leapt out of the housing, twelve centis long and double-edged.
Her claws, as Justin rather facetiously referred to them. Her absolute most favoritest thing she owned, better than her sapphire earrings--though she would never tell Justin that. The blade housing reinforced her wrist, allowing it to bend forward but not back or sideways. The hair-trigger was a magnetic toggle. Another twitch of her fingers, and the blades retracted.
She rarely used them on a job; the marks they made were too distinctive, and Quinn was neither foolish enough nor psychotic enough to brand her hits. But she'd never found a better defensive weapon: their sleek design and light weight made her appear unarmed until it was too late. Which was precisely what the prosecuting attorney had told the jury at her trial. As if that was supposed to make her devious or something.
"Hello?" Justin's voice said abruptly.
She'd forgotten she was on hold. She picked the phone up from her lap and wedged it on her shoulder. "Hello, lover."
"Hey, gorgeous," he said, his voice warming. "I take it you arrived safe and sound?"
"Nothing eventful to report," she said, picking up the other glove and a thin blade. "Just setting up house now."
"So how's good old Ariston?"
"Hot. Dirty. Stinks. Feels like home."
Justin laughed. "What's the job look like?"
"Haven't got the particulars yet--I'm supposed to meet with the mook in about four hours." She glanced at her watch. "Figured I'd go out and set up the caches, first. You did say you got those accounts primed?"
"Yeah, you've got about half a million, between them."
"You're so good to me. Give me the numbers."
Justin did: three numbered accounts at three different banking institutions, one of them Embassy reserve. He got a kick out of that, doing business with the Feds. She noted each number in her palmscreen, matched them up with her backup passports. Three different portraits of her, each with a different name and hairstyle.
"Got it," she said. She tossed the palmscreen aside and picked up the glove again.
"So how long you think you'll be there?" Justin asked.
"No clue, I don't even know who the target is yet."
"You said it was probably a public official."
"I said that was likely, because if it was somebody local, drug dealers or whatever, they'd have used their own people." That was a large part of why she'd been able to avoid Ariston for so long--there just wasn't that much work out here. "Somebody bothers to call in a freelancer, it means they have to be discreet. So it's probably someone in a prominent position, needs to be taken care of quietly."
"Ambassador?"
"Ha." She shifted the phone to her other shoulder and pulled the glove onto her right hand, began tightening down the catch. "That'd be one for the resume, wouldn't it? But it's more likely somebody corporate--the assistant production manager wants the manager taken out so he can get his post, or something. All those people are from off-world, too, and some of those crèche-babies could afford me." Quinn prided herself on having few prejudices, but she would freely admit to a bias against the so-called parent corporations, who indentured their upper-echelon employees as soon as they could talk, and refused to hire anyone who hadn't been through their schools. Brainwashing, as far as Quinn was concerned. They also tended to practice gene enhancement therapy on their indentures, but that was a whole other prejudice.
"So you figure on a week? Stephen's fall runway show is at the end of the month, don't forget."
"Yes, I'm aware of that, thank you. And I plan to be there, I just may be a little late." An alarming thought suddenly occurred to her. "You didn't tell him where I was going, did you?"
"Well, no, but if you're late I'll have to tell him you're out on a job. I'm not going to lie."
"Oh, please. You lie all the time, just for the practice."
"It's not like he'd care, Quinn. He's been saying for years you ought to go back there."
"He would care, Justin. Especially if you tell him, 'Quinn's finally gone off to Ariston to look for that Ladron asshole, to make sure he's really dead. Better get the extraction team ready, because you know she doesn't have any sense where he's concerned.'"
"I did not tell him, as a matter of fact. And I do not think that, so please don't put words in my mouth."
Quinn clenched and unclenched her fist, making the blades snick in and out of their housing.
"You're being awfully touchy about this, for it being just another job," he said.
She made a scornful noise. "It's not the job that's bothering me."
"Fine. Sorry to be such a nuisance for worrying about you."
"You don't have to worry about me, Justin, that's my point!" She threw the glove into her bag and made an effort to reign in her temper. They'd been having this same fight for a week, now. Eight years they'd been together, and he couldn't seem to grasp the fact that she wasn't the same adolescent mess he'd picked up on Blue Haven orbitdock.
Of course when she was looking at it objectively she knew it had nothing to do with her--it was he who couldn't stop playing the daddy figure. Justin was a control freak, a neatnik, a circles-and-arrows type, and it just about drove him nuts that she preferred to take life as it came. The nature of her job demanded a bit of organization and preparation, but it also required her to turn on a dime, change direction with often a split-second's warning. Justin hated that, and he hated that she thrived on it, and he blamed what he perceived as a flaw in her personality on some vague, unresolved Ladron issue that existed only in his own mind. Ladron had been what Justin called a street-level thug, but Quinn had learned plenty from him, long before she hooked up with Justin. And that really got under Justin's skin, the idea that she might have made herself something without his help.
"Look, I've got to go," she said, because it was true and because she didn't want to go on with this conversation.
"Of course you do. As soon as anybody accuses you of acting childish, you're all about business."
Quinn said nothing. She gripped the phone's handset as if she would strangle it.
"Shit," Justin muttered. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. Look, just be careful, okay?"
"He's dead, Justin. And even if he weren't, this isn't about him. It stopped being about him a long time ago."
"I realize that. I do."
"I'll call you back tonight, after I meet with the mook."
"All right. I love you."
Manipulative jackass, she thought. "Love you, too." She set the handset back on the cradle. "And one of these days I'm going to wring your neck."
* * *
Quinn left the hotel slightly better-dressed than she had come in, in sleek-fitting jeans and a low-cut white tee-shirt, hair twisted up in a messy, flirty knot. Casual handbag over her shoulder, with her palmscreen and a couple of surveillance devices inside. The passports, too.
The magnetic lock she'd installed inside the doorframe worked on remote control, and she engaged it before hanging the Do Not Disturb tag on the knob. Wouldn't do to have the cleaning service stumbling over that equipment in her suitcase.
Then it was out into the City. Sunglasses in place, bouncing along in the bright sunlight. Feeling pretty cheerful about the whole thing, really. City looked like a whole different place when you had money and knew you could get out whenever you'd had enough of the heat and dust and grime.
She hailed a cab at the edge of the docks and rode across town to the commercial district. At the first of the three banks, she verified the account with one of the false passports, and made a cash withdrawal. Then she signed for the safe deposit box Justin had registered under one of her aliases, got access to a privacy room, and deposited the cash and the passport in the box.
Outside, she walked a few blocks--grinning at the two college boys who pretended to have heart attacks when they saw her--and hailed another cab, to another bank further north. The scenery got better as she rode further uptown. There was more greenery than she remembered, and fountains. Obscene flaunting of water consumption, given Ariston City's desert climate.
There were also, she noticed, more soldiers around. Embassy soldiers, in their gray uniforms, and not just on leave. They had been conspicuous outside the banks and tended to stand out on the street corners, around the docks. Not on guard, but patrolling. Casual-like. It was odd; in the old days you expected to see Embassy troops near the tariff station and maybe the Immigrant office, but not patrolling the streets. Ariston City had its own police force for that. Was the city under occupation, and she'd somehow missed it? She had been very thorough in checking the local newslines; something like that would have shown up.
The last bank on her route was in a high-end shopping plaza in the ritzy end of town, and she had deliberately saved it for last. She stashed this latest, biggest wad of cash in her purse, then went to assault the boutiques. The jeans and tee-shirt she had on were the nicest clothes she'd brought with her, and she'd need some things with a little more chic for the upcoming evenings.
She was a little pressed for time, now, but luckily Quinn had a figure that was not hard to fit. And the boutiques on the north side of Ariston City actually had some very nice things to choose from; she even saw some knockoffs of Stephen Zoja's designs. She bought a black cocktail dress, two pairs of black pants--one dressy, one practical--a couple of black tee-shirts, a long-sleeved turtleneck, a lovely white silk blouse, and a black zip-up sport jacket with a lot of pockets. Stockings, lingerie, and come-hither satin pumps, all black of course. A few pieces of jewelry, and a garment bag to put it all in. Not bad for ninety minutes of shopping. Quinn could be very efficient when she needed to be.
Then it was back in a cab, a couple blocks over, out at the Royalty hotel. She breezed through the lobby, thinking she would have been tossed out of this place toute suite, back in the old days, but no one gave her a second glance except the doorman, and his was discreetly appreciative.
She went to the desk, a bit breathless, gave the clerk a winning smile and said she had a reservation in the name of Lorelei Tierney. "And will you put this in the safe, for me?" she asked, handing over the last envelope full of cash and the Tierney passport. "I don't want to leave it in my room."
"Certainly, Ms. Tierney," the desk clerk said.
"Is the lounge back this way?"
"Yes ma'am, past the fountain on your left."
"How late does the spa stay open?"
"The pool and health club are open around the clock, the salon and the masseurs are available until eight. Shall I make you an appointment?"
"Later, thank you," Quinn said, and took the key-card offered her. It was seven-thirty now, barely evening as far as the Aristonian nightlife went, but it had gone from hazy afternoon to dusk during the ten-minute cab ride from the plaza to the hotel. With that mountain range around the city, night fell fast and sudden.
Nice place, she thought, appraising the lobby as she crossed it. Lots of exits. Multiple elevators. Staircase in plain sight.
Her room was on the second floor, at the end of the hall near the fire-escape, exactly as she had requested. It was much cleaner and more comfortable than the room across town, with soft ambient lighting and a mini-bar. Smelled nicer, too. She slung the garment bag across the bed, took out the cocktail dress and hung it up, then grabbed her purse and went into the bathroom.
It was luxurious, with a very tempting bathtub that made her think it wouldn't hurt to spend a night or two at this venue, under this alias. But not right now; she was going to be late if she didn't hurry.
She stripped naked, dropping her clothes in a pile on the rug, and wiped down with a cold washcloth. Running around in the heat was sticky business. Then she dug into the front pocket of her purse, pulling out several cosmetics and a contact lens case.
Bending forward over the sink, she blinked out her lenses one at a time and put them away, then closed both eyes and gave a guttural sigh of relief. She hated the damn things, hated the way they blurred her peripheral vision and made her pupils slow to react to light changes, but in the bright sunlight at least their concealing opacity gave her some protection from the glare. And of course it wouldn't do for any of the dozens of clerks and flight attendants and bank tellers she met on this trip to remember an athletic young woman with a lot of money and eyes like a cat's.
Not that her slitted pupils were completely unique, or even all that shocking. Some of the technoheads had far more bizarre things done to their bodies, in the name of protest or personal growth or whatever. It had also been fashionable, a few years ago, in certain artsy circles, to have corneal implants done in animal or fanciful shapes. The few people who saw Quinn's real eyes and didn't know better assumed she'd had them done to look stylish.
She had not had them done at all--it had been done to her, when she was far too young to have any say in the matter, and they were not mere cosmetic implants. She could see in the dark better than any cat, and her vision was tremendously sharp--she could read a matchbook cover from across the room. Her hearing and sense of smell were similarly keen, and of course she was far stronger than she looked, but none of that showed. It was only her eyes that had to be hidden.
Not tonight, though, not for meeting with the mook. Mooks tended to be intimidated by the look, and tonight she wanted to appear very feline: the pampered pet of a wealthy, stylish hit man whom no one ever saw but whose reputation preceded him.
There were only five people alive who knew who Quinn Taylor really was, and she was the only one not safely sequestered on Natoshi.
She put her makeup on quickly and simply: kohl and carmine, with a touch of powder to highlight her porcelain skin. Her hair, when let down and brushed, was silky-straight, mahogany with glints of red.
The new black lingerie was very nice--she might even take it home with her, Justin would like it. Stockings. Cocktail dress: a slinky black sheath with spaghetti straps, that came to the point of her shoulders and dipped into her décolletage. Gracefully arched heels. Jet earrings.
She left the room at precisely five til eight.
* * *
Quinn liked bars, even though she didn't drink. She liked the energy of them, and the smells of barely-contained sex and violence. In lower-class establishments, the violence tended to predominate, and often was not contained at all. In a swank joint like the Royalty's lounge, it was all about the rutting. A great many couples were already hard at work hooking up, and several male heads swung her way as she walked in. Their interest buzzed like mosquitoes over her skin, but she ignored them.
Sitting at the bar was out of the question, even though it gave her the best view of the room. She did not want to be distracted by idiots trying to pick her up. Instead, she found a high table to one side of the door, slightly behind the piano, where she could watch everyone come and go, but was partially concealed from the rest of the room. The waitress came by and she ordered a mineral water with lemon, and a sushi appetizer. Lunch on orbitdock had been almost six hours ago, but she wasn't terribly hungry. Never was, when her nerves were tuned this high.
God, she loved her job.
The mook was almost twenty minutes late. Quinn was well into her sashimi when the man walked into the lounge.
He was looking for somebody, that was easy, but unlike the other single people who had come into the bar, he did not crane his neck and then rush with relief into the arms of his party. There was no sense of urgency about him at all; in fact he had a lazy, leonine quality that she rather admired. He was wearing a black suit, a bit edgy without drawing attention to itself. Slightly taller than average, lean and self-assured in movement. Not a mook, then. This was a Representative.
He did a leisurely scan of the lounge, and she was pretty sure he saw her the first time, but he took his time about approaching her. He went to the bar first, ordered, and was given two drinks by the bartender. He brought both of them to her table.
Nice touch, that. Made it look less than random. She reclined in her chair, legs crossed, her own drink cradled in hand as she watched him approach.
"Miss Tierney?" he said.
"Lorelei," she offered, with a cool smile.
"Jano," he replied, and set one of the glasses--a mimosa--before her, before taking the other chair. He was about forty-five, with dark hair and artistic touches of gray at the temples. A high-ranking lieutenant, she guessed. His eyes were very pale, almost silver. He also smelled of alcohol, and not just from the glass in his hand. It was pervasive, as if it emanated from his pores.
He was appraising her as frankly as she did him. "You're lovely," he said. "I hadn't expected that."
"You're observant," she replied. "And neither did I."
Amusement curled the corners of his mouth but did not reach his eyes. “Had a chance to look at the city?”
"We made a few stops. Priced some real estate."
"What kind of price range you looking at?"
"Something around three million."
Jano's eyebrows lifted. "That's some pricey property."
She smiled. "You want quality, you have to pay for it. Location like this, with good security— plus the broker has to get her cut."
"Well, she's a ballsy bitch."
She smiled broader, showing teeth. "You better believe it."
"Has anyone ever told you, you have the most fascinating eyes?"
"Frequently." She'd been waiting for him to say something; he'd been staring since he sat down. Up close, his mannerisms did not match his air of collected poise at a distance. His gaze was too direct, his expressions remote and calculated. Sociopath, she thought. The business tended to attract them. They were never as smart as they thought they were, and tended to get annoyed with her because she didn't follow their scripts. "Do you have some property we should look at?"
"No, seriously. You remind me of someone. Have you ever been to Earth?"
Not since she was thirteen. “We vacation there every year.”
”You could be her twin,” Jano said. His head was cocked to one side, a dreamy little smile upon his face. He tapped his fingers twice on the table; Quinn glimpsed a small clear datacard beneath his lightly cupped palm. “There’s a listing you should look at. I think it’s in your price range. Access isn't the best, though. Do you have your own E-class?”
”We were looking at buying one,” Quinn said, thinking Bingo. Limited access had to mean somebody in a public office, which bothered her not at all. Her first paying job had been a crime lord who barricaded himself in Bridgeport space station, with a network of nanites to provide security. Nobody was invulnerable. Unless Jano was being literal, and the target was in deadspace. That might get tricky.
Jano curled his fingers and flicked. The datacard skated across the tabletop to be trapped under her waiting palm.
"I’ll check it out," she said. "If I like it, I’ll pass it by him. If he likes it, I’ll be in touch."
"How soon? We’re on a schedule."
"Tomorrow," she said. A day, even an Ariston twenty-three hour day, was plenty of time to review the dossier and do a little recon. "Half in advance is the down payment."
"That's what I hear," Jano said. He stood, his teeth baring in a Doberman grin. "You look just like her."
"I get that a lot," Quinn said.