Watching the pieces of fat shrivel into hard, brittle nuggets, she smiled again. Yeah. Real damn good.
9
THE SECOND HALF OF THE DAY PASSED QUICKLY FOR Hawkes. He and the sheriff coordinated all the information found by both their teams. Unfortunately, none of it added up to anything that gave them either a solid conclusion or course of action.
Not yet, anyway, thought Hawkes, keeping himself under control. It will, though. It will.
So far, they had discovered a lot. Stine had managed to sabotage their home defenses by concentrating his efforts in only one area. Just thinking of the nearly fatal mistake he had made—harboring the traitor in his own home—made Hawkes's blood boil, but he contained himself. The sheriff had listed the aide's death as just a part of the slaughter, turning a blind eye to whose hand had been responsible for that part of the slaughter.
The damage Stine had done to their defenses had been purposely minimal. He had opened only a thin-line breach in the radar and motion-detection fields, but it was all the invaders had needed. They had hard-marched in, carrying with them everything they needed.
No vehicles had been discovered left behind at their entry point, indicating that the invaders had been dropped off. The ambassador's defense network had also registered entry into the ranch's airspace during the attack period. Most likely a pickup craft coming for the attackers. When it received no landing signal from any of the invaders it must have simply left.
That bit of information alone clued Hawkes to the fact that his enemies had known all their people were eliminated as early as the night before. The discovery of Morte chips built into the armor of the dead showed him that not only had their unseen foes known their troops were captured, they had known that they all were dead—even at what moment they had died. The chip signals had all been sent in the general direction of the intruding aircraft.
His people had tried to get a fix on the craft after it had exited Hawkes's airspace, but its pilot had looped out of the mountains to the south, into a several-hundred-square-mile area where no one had any tracking devices in operation. They could have gone off in any direction. Another dead end.
Tracing weapons, ammunition, body armor, uniforms: they discovered a great deal of information, none of which did them any good. All of the recovered equipment and uniforms were standard gear—nothing specialized, all of it bought on the black market. No matter what their sources were, they all traced back to stolen or smuggled points of origin.
Someone out there is pretty good at covering his tracks, thought Hawkes. Too good. There has to be something they missed, though. And we'll find it.
Body identification searches did not do them any good, either. Every one of the intruders turned up as having been officially listed dead years earlier.
The sheriff joked that time had finally caught up with them, but the discovery kept them from getting any further. Although they were able to identify all of the invaders, they could find no common thread to any three of them. Some pairs had known each other in the past, but not in a way that pointed any definite fingers toward a possible organization point for the attack.
The invaders had been of all sorts: Common labor pool, mostly ex-military from more than one country. Two electricians, several with bio-growth backgrounds. All skilled workers, but no geniuses. No one who would ever be missed.
Nor had they been for almost three years. One by one, each of them had disappeared from all the official records Hawkes's reach could access. The Earth records for more than 150 nations, those from Skyhook, Lunar Colony, and from Mars showed no mention of the men and women who had tried to kill him the night before after their "termination" dates.
They had also focused on Stine, but had no greater luck there. Stine was not cut from the same fold. He had still been officially alive the day before. But once investigated, his background showed no sinister connections, either: no hidden bank accounts, no large withdrawals that might show a pattern of blackmail—nothing.
All they discovered was that he was a loyal junior member of the nation's diplomatic corps. He was effectively clean—had no trails leading from him to anyone he should not have known. Nothing hooked him to Deutcher, to the Martian unions, or to their managers, either. Not to Senator Carri or Clean Mountain Enterprises . . . not to anyone.
Which, of course, is why whoever did this picked him.
Hawkes pushed his chair away from the table with a weary gesture. Sheriff Morgan did the same. As the sheriff got up and crossed the room to the stove, the ambassador thought, You've been set up real good this time. Somebody wants us out of the way—someone we can't identify, someone we can't even assign a reason to.
Morgan turned back from the stove. He held the coffeepot up in the air, holding it at an angle and tilting his head to ask Hawkes if he wanted another cup. The ambassador shook his head. After the sheriff had filled his own mug, he said, "That's about it. We've drug this thing around the yard about as many times as it's going to go."
"I know."
"And . . . I hate to mention it, but pretty soon I'm going to have to tell some more people about this. You being the target—that makes it federal all by itself. World court's going to want a piece of things, too. Media— they'll be trying to fry me for sitting on top of things." He took a long sip of his coffee, more to give Hawkes time to think than anything
