The Third Claw of God

12 PHILIP, EXCLUDED

Philip Bettelhine sat with his face in his hands, his rigid manner now fully given way to the dazed retreat of a man whose foundations had turned to sand beneath him. “I don’t understand,” he said. “This should be impossible.”

I don’t think he was speaking to me but to the universe in general, a structure that, having proved the invulnerability of the Bettelhines a fraud, might have also been planning to jettison gravity, relativity, and thermodynamics as well. Whatever veneer of defiance he’d displayed earlier, when it was still possible to place hope in the prospect of a rescue from the support systems his family had paid for, had crumbled with this latest blow. He was too strong a man not to bounce back, but this was his nadir. This was when he’d be most vulnerable.

I asked him, “Why would it be impossible, sir?”

“I… don’t understand.”

“You know what I’m talking about. Every human society since the beginning of the industrial revolution has known its anarchists, its saboteurs, its terrorists. The more we advance, the greater the stakes, the easier it becomes for mal-contents to knock over our sand castles. Why would this be impossible? Why would this not happen?”

His eyes were red-rimmed, his tone petulant. “It just…shouldn’t be able to.”

“Again: Why not? Why would you have security if you didn’t have at least the possibility of criminals?”

“We have criminals,” he said, as if clinging to this one fact. “We have prisons.”

“Certainly. That’s a human society down there. I’m willing to bet you have any number of run-of-the-mill thieves, rapists, murderers, and sociopaths; in fact, I’m sure that Farley over there cannot be your only pederast, though he’s certainly one too many. But how come you’re so shaken by the revelation that you may have more than that? After all, you have thousands, maybe millions, of people directly involved in the development of newer and deadlier weapons, including I presume those that would permit the hijacking of this elevator. Why would you consider it impossible for some disgruntled tech to gather together whatever resources they needed for exactly this kind of stab at the Bettelhine heart? In a world where advanced weaponry has been the very basis of your daily business, why have there never been any ambitious would-be conquerors willing to attempt a coup d’état?”

He said nothing, but instead just looked at his hands. Juje help the hereditary leader whose personal strength has never been adequately tested; on the day that test comes, his very bones may turn out be made of sand. Maybe he’d stand up again, stronger than before. Maybe he wouldn’t.

I searched my fellow passengers for the unguarded expression or relaxed posture that would give away those to whom this development would have come as no surprise. I saw nothing. Jason looked pale and shaken, still determined to maintain a confident unfrightened veneer even if the reactions of his body were just as determined to betray him. Jelaine seemed angrier, though just as frightened, the gestalt of those two emotions a determination to hurt somebody once she knew just who deserved to be hurt. Farley Pearlman remained at the bar, working on what may have been his six or seventh drink, staring at his latest glass as if he envied the liqueur’s capacity to conform to its shape. Dina Pearlman glared back at me, but with a furious concentration that seemed, to me, testimony that she was struggling just as hard to figure out what was going on as the rest of us. Dejah was just angry. Monday Brown looked ill, the perspiration dripping from his forehead as if every moment the Bettelhines remained out of control required additional effort on his own part, just to cope. Vernon Wethers looked worse. The four stewards, Mendez, Colette Wilson, Paakth-Doy and Loyal Jeck all looked like the recipients of recent blows to the base of the spine, though even as I watched Doy and Colette both offered me their own highly different attempts at comforting smiles. Skye circled all of us like a herding animal, her eyes constantly moving as she searched for any cue I might miss. Oscin continued the task that had occupied him for long minutes now, examining the Khaajiir’s body from every angle he could find. Nobody seemed willing to step forward and identify themselves as the hijacker in charge.

Instead, it was Philip who spoke again. “We…still don’t know that this is anything more than a malfunction.”

“Please,” Dejah begged him. “Forget the rest of us. Tell us any other reason that the Stanley would want to keep its distance rather than do anything it could to rescue Jason, Jelaine, and you. Just one.”

“It’s impossible,” he said again. It was the very structure of his universe.

After him, the most likely sources of useful information were Jason and Jelaine. I studied them for a moment, saw them both willing to make eye contact with me, both straining with the awareness that they’d withheld vital information, both eager to tell me but unsure whether they should or not. I saw apologies in their eyes, even a brave half-smile on Jelaine’s lips. But they didn’t speak up, neither one of them, not in front of these others.

Fine. So it was time to come at this by some other angle. I turned away from Philip, making no secret of the disgust I felt for him and his denials, and addressed the group at large. “If any of you know anything, anything at all, that might shed some more light on what’s happening here, understand that I will find it out, sooner or later, whether you come forward now or continue to stay silent in the hopes that I’ll go away. That won’t happen. This is what I do for a living, and though I’m damn good at my job, I don’t particularly appreciate it being made difficult. Trust me. You don’t want me annoyed.”

The parlor was so still that the ambient sound excluded even our respective breath.

Jason seemed about to break. Jelaine seemed even more anxious. But there was something else there as well, something that worried me almost as much as whatever our culprit or culprits were prepared to do next.

Sadness.

Whatever their absent father Hans had to tell me, neither relished the thought of this being the time and place.

I picked one of the two at random and went to Jason, who slumped a little at my approach, not in fear but in resignation, the sadness spreading from his eyes to the planes of his face.

I said, “You told me before, that you wanted to be friends.”

He actually smiled at that. “Yes.”

“Forgive me for saying that, right now, I don’t.”

The smile did not falter. “I’m sorry to hear that, Counselor.”

“If you brought me this far, you already know about me, including my willingness to blight the lives of people who obstruct my investigations. Will you believe me when I tell you, right now, that I’ve already figured out more than you want me to tell the other people in this room? That I’ve confirmed that very sensitive deduction in just the few seconds since the two of us started this conversation? And that I have absolutely no problem with passing on what I know, right here, out loud?”

Had I expected that to break him, I would have been doomed to disappointment. If anything, he just looked more confident, probably because I’d phrased exposure as a threat rather than an inevitability. He glanced at his brother, who had frozen stock-still in anticipation of the secret now hanging in the air between us, and smiled. “Well, I’ll be damned. You did trip me up. I must give you credit, Counselor. You’re—”

“Please. Spare me the compliments about how remarkable I am. I’ve had my fill of that this evening, and I’m damn sick of it. I just want answers. Any answers. I’ll even start with a small one. How do I make the Khaajiir’s staff work?”

This, at last, surprised him. “His staff?”

I ticked off my observations at a hammering staccato rate rate that barely permitted intake of breath. “One: as I told Mr. Pescziuwicz earlier, Bocaians have never been especially known for their talent at learning languages beyond whatever native tongue they learned first. Two: in fact, they’re particularly bad at it. Three: despite that, the Khaajiir made part of his reputation as a scholar studying the past of another species, an endeavor that must have required substantial poring through primary sources. Four: he even demonstrated his fondness for multilingual puns, demonstrating several that required knowledge of extinct languages. Five: chatty as he was, the Khaajiir barely spoke at all during dinner, when his hands were so busy dealing with his meal that he could not retain a consistent grip on his staff. Six: when he did want to speak up, he grabbed his staff first. Seven: when he lost his staff upon falling to the floor, he asked for the staff in Bocaian. Eight: I’ve been told that I spoke Bocaian at some point today, not an impossible slip given that I grew up speaking the language, but still one sufficient to make me wonder how come I’m not aware of uttering words in a tongue I haven’t uttered since my childhood. Nine: just about everything else I said today was spoken in the presence of other people who had no difficulty understanding my words. Ten: the Khaajiir spoke directly to me while I was examining his staff, and I replied. Conclusion: during those few seconds it provided the same service for me that it provided for him. It translated for me. Corollary Number One: since it stores data, it might also contain information about his scholarly activities and about his mission here, information that may prove invaluable when it comes to determining just why an assassin of his species or any other would want to kill him. Corollary Number Two: since Jelaine’s actions after the emergency stop prove that the two of you have been apprised of its capabilities, you might as well take this opportunity to tell me anything I need to know about its operation or what data I should be looking for. I’ll have more pressing questions for you later, but that, at least, would be a fine start.”

There was a moment of stunned silence. Dejah’s lips curled still further. Jelaine sipped from a drink that might not have been hers. Philip seemed to have woken up; he now sat up straighter, his eyes darting from his brother to his sister in furious search of the sensitive deduction I’d alluded to and which he must have wished he could share.

Jason wore no signs of defeat, just an increased sadness, as if my rejection of his friendship remained the most heartbreaking experience he’d been through all day. He spoke softly, as if placating a recalcitrant child. “The translation function is automatic, for anybody holding the staff by the friction strip. Opening the Khaajiir’s files requires the use of a Bocaian password phrase: ‘Decch-taanil blaach nil Al-Vaafir.’ Speaking it out in a clear tone of voice, once, will train the internal software to recognize it when subvocalized. After that you’ll have permanent access.”

The closest Mercantile translation to the phrase he’d given me was Judgment Denied the Heavenly Fathers, an odd combination of words given that no Bocaian sect I’d ever heard of had any orthodox creation myth. It didn’t matter; passwords are hardest to crack when random, and the Khaajiir would have been just as baffled by one I’d used to shield my personal files during one nasty dispute over interspecies jurisdiction: Pity the Fat Tchi with My Elbow up His Ass. I asked the Porrinyards, “Did you get that?”

“Decch-taanil,” Oscin began.

“Blaach nil Al-Vaafir,” Skye concluded.

“Great. Pick one of you to stay here and one of you to work on it on private.”

They nodded. Without any discussion, Skye remained where she was, while Oscin took the Khaajiir’s bloody staff down the stairs.

I tried not to let my satisfaction show on my face. It made sense for the Porrinyards to pore through the Khaajiir’s files; their data-absorption speed was so far beyond mine that relegating this job to them could save me hours in pursuing false leads. Still, there was no need to make them do more work than necessary, so I turned my attention back to Jason. “Anything in particular you think we should focus on?”

“Yes,” Jason said, his tone now determinedly upbeat, as if he could only be happy now that the strain of keeping secrets was safely in the past. “The Khaajiir’s writings relating K’cenhowten’s Enlightenment to his theory of historical momentum. A failed and then aborted Bettelhine project, from some three generations back, called Mjolnir, a reference to the hammer of the ancient-Earth Norse thunder deity, Thor. The writings and eventual fate of one Lillian Jane Bettelhine, my paternal aunt, now deceased. These are all things your friends would no doubt uncover within a couple of hours; you might as well find them now and then get back to me once you’re done, if you have any questions. Or, you could just take me aside and ask me. I won’t make you waste any more time.”

“You’re too late. Besides, I’ll have more questions for you soon enough.” A deep breath. “Right now I’d like a few minutes alone with your brother.”

Philip stirred himself and began to stand.

Vernon Wethers raised his hand. “Ummm…I object.”

It was the first time he’d spoken in quite a while. His soft, hesitant voice, an open apology for itself, startled in ways that angrier interjections might not have.

I said, “This is not a court of law, Mr. Wethers.”

His lips moved for a beat or two before words emerged. “No, but it is still my duty to stand for Philip Bettelhine’s interests, and I take that mission seriously. I must insist on being present during any consultation.”

I liked that: consultation rather than questioning. Even his word choice cleansed any implication of guilt from the moment.

What I didn’t like was Wethers. The man was a shadow, not just in terms of his habitual proximity to his employer, but also in personality as well. I had sensed no structure to him, no emotional depth that did not exist except as an imprint of the man he served. It would be dangerous to conclude from this that handling Philip would amount to handling him as well. Fanatics always have their own trajectories. But now that he’d spoken up…“Very well. Understand that some of my questions will be of a personal, and perhaps embarrassing, nature. You might find yourself intruding on Mr. Bettelhine’s feelings.”

Wethers dabbed at the corners of his lips with a napkin, then stood, adjusting his jacket to bring it incrementally back in line with the character-deprived perfection he owed the Bettelhine empire. “That is all right. Mr. Bettelhine knows that wherever his personal life is concerned, it has never been my function to form opinions…”

Philip Bettelhine sat on the edge of the couch in the outer suite, downcast, his wrists propped on his knees and his hands dangling like dead fish. His eyes avoided mine, making contact only long enough to establish that every instant of the process was being catalogued for future resentment. His creature Wethers stood against what would have been the panoramic window, his arms folded over his chest and his colorless eyes maintaining a strict focus on his employer that suggested years of reading volumes from every micro-alteration in Philip’s facial expressions. I would have found constant appraisal of that kind both off-putting and creepy, but Philip seemed used to it, and accepted his vassal’s gaze as his due even as he took mine as impudent intrusion.

Paakth-Doy, uncomfortable in this company, sat apart from all of us, trying not to make eye contact.

I said, “Mr. Bettelhine, you don’t like me very much, do you?”

He looked tired, the question already pushing him to the limits of his patience. “From what I’ve been able to determine, not all that many people do.”

“Your brother and sister seem to.”

“Is that what this discussion’s going to be? Juvenile tallies of who likes whom? Please. I know I’m comfortable disliking you, I know you’re comfortable disliking me, and I think you and I have much more pressing business to talk about.”

He didn’t know it, but I found myself respecting him more after that little speech than I had at any point since meeting him. Honest dislike is always a breath of fresh air. “You don’t know why they invited me.”

“They didn’t invite you. My father invited you. But no.”

“You resent my presence.”

“I resent you strutting around like you own the place, especially when I’m the bastard who owns the place. Your actual presence doesn’t bother me one way or the other.”

“What do you think of me being the honored guest of your father?”

His tone dulled. “It baffles me.”

“The same would go for his close association with the Khaajiir.”

“Of course.”

“You don’t know what that’s about, either?”

“If my father wanted me to know, my father would have told me.”

“Have you asked him?”

“He has let me know that he considers the matter classified.”

“Is this typical of your relationship?”

Philip rubbed his eyes, as much, I think, to continue avoiding mine as to alleviate any strain he may have felt over the disasters of the evening. “My father and I have more than one relationship, Counselor. As a father with a respected and accomplished son, he has often been very close to me. As Chief Executive Officer commanding one of his chief lieutenants, he has sometimes been obliged to keep information flow on a need-to-know basis. I understand this. It is not atypical.”

“And yet,” I said, leaning in close, “as an accomplished executive in your own right, one often assumed to be your father’s most likely successor, who would at the very least hope to be groomed for greater and greater responsibility as you rise in the family profession, you would also expect to become privy to more classified and secret material as the years passed and the time of succession grew ever closer.”

“Yes, that would follow.”

“So the significance of the few secrets still being kept from you would also be increasing throughout this time?”

“Yes.”

“These secrets would currently include the reasons for my visit, or Dejah Shapiro’s, or for the Khaajiir’s long stay, or for the involvement of your siblings Jason and Jelaine?”

“Yes.”

I excused myself, went to the bathroom, poured myself a glass of water, and downed it to the dregs before returning. When I came back, he was still where I’d left him, neither his position, nor Vernon Wethers’s, having moved a millimeter. It was impossible not to wonder how many strings bound these two men, and how many misdeeds they’d plotted in rooms as luxurious as this one.

I smiled at him. Like most of my smiles, it was not meant to be a pleasant one. “A number of years ago Jason went missing.”

“That’s common knowledge,” Philip said.

“He returned after what are alleged to have been hellish experiences on a crumbling wheelworld called Deriflys, and was welcomed back into the bosom of his family. How did you feel about that?”

The question didn’t surprise him, but the color rose in his cheeks, and his eyes blasted me with still-gathering heat of his resentment. “How do you think I felt about that? He’s my brother. I was older, and had a different mother, so I hadn’t spent as much time with him while he was growing up as Jelaine and some of the children closer to his own age, but he was still important to me. Nobody was happier than me when Jelaine was able to straighten him out, and he was able to find some purpose in his life.”

“It didn’t bother you that he’d been welcomed back when you’d been a loyal, dependable son all along?”

More anger. “Maybe it would have, if I’d been a selfish brat insecure about my own place in the family’s affections.”

“And were you?”

“Which, a selfish brat or insecure in my family’s affections? I’ll cop to the first, at least sometimes; it’s an occupational hazard of being wealthy. But never to the second.”

“There was no question of jealousy?”

He rolled his eyes, spared a do-you-believe-this-bitch look for the impassive Wethers, and then faced me again. “There it is. The most noxious cliché ever concocted about wealthy families. The siblings are always corrupt caricatures, sniping at each other as they jockey for favor. The parents are always malignant, domineering old farts, emitting a constant barrage of slicing remarks as they threaten to exclude the unfit among their offspring. Is that how you like to picture us, Counselor?” He snorted. “Unfortunately for your preconceptions, that’s never been true of the Bettelhines. Whatever you may think of the way my family treats other people, we’ve always cared for our own.”

“So no sibling rivalry.”

“None? Please. We’re human. Just none of the kind you’re positing.”

“Not even when you lost Jelaine?”

He scowled. “I haven’t lost Jelaine.”

“True,” I allowed, “but Jason and Jelaine appear to be a closed unit that excludes you, not just from whatever they’ve been doing with your father and the Khaajiir, and not just from the business divisions they’ve been able to wrest from you, but also from any emotional connection to them as siblings. They don’t seem to hate you. They just don’t seem to have need of your presence. Are you going to claim that doesn’t bother you, either?”

I almost expected him to deny that as well, and for a moment he seemed about to, but then he glanced at Wethers again, and exhaled a lungful of hoarded breath. “No. I won’t claim that. I resent the hell out of it. Are you satisfied?”

“How did it happen, Mr, Bettelhine?”

He was angry again, but not at me. “I’m not sure that any of this is your goddamn business, Counselor, and we’ll have to talk about making sure you don’t take it anywhere outside this room, but when Jason returned from that place, he was not quite right. Oh, sure, he said the things he was expected to say, and did the things he was expected to do, and even managed to charm the eligible ladies when our parents threw a weekend ball in his honor, but he never really reconnected with us or with the life he’d thrown away. He was just playacting, giving us what he thought we wanted from him, and though it was goddamned convincing much of the time, we couldn’t spend time in his presence without seeing the look that came into his eyes whenever he thought we weren’t watching. I still don’t know everything that happened to him, during those years—it’s one of the many things he hasn’t seen fit to share with me—but I can tell you that we all knew it was still happening. I thought the family was going to lose him again, one way or the other.”

“And then?”

“One day after that ball I told you about, which is best described as a restrained disaster, Jelaine told me she’d made arrangements with Father to let her take Jason on an extended tour offworld. She said there were things Jason needed to deal with, leftover business from his days away. She said she was going to make sure he got the chance. Now, me, I absolutely hated the idea, since leaving Xana the first time had been such a disaster for him, but Jelaine seemed sure, and she’d already gotten Father’s approval, so it was going to happen, one way or the other.”

“Did you ask your father why he’d said yes?”

“He told me he wanted his son back.”

“And you?”

“I wanted my brother back.”

“But you were still against the idea.”

“I considered Jason toxic,” Philip said. “I’d seen him, a favorite son, flit off and subject himself to horrors the rest of us couldn’t even imagine. I saw him come back a shell of himself, not connecting with us or with anything around him. And now I saw him sucking Jelaine in too. Don’t you see? I was afraid of losing her too!”

“How did you deal with that?”

“Since I couldn’t stop them from going, I offered to jettison my responsibilities and come along. I said it was to help support Jason, but by then I didn’t think anything could help Jason. I was more interested in being the voice of reason, standing between him and Jelaine. But Jelaine said no. She said she knew what she was doing. She said I should trust her. And so I did what a brother does. I let her go and hoped for the best.”

“And is…‘the best’… what you got?”

He clenched his fists, opened them, then massaged each hand with the other, as if subconsciously washing them. “When they returned, Jason was a new man, centered, secure in himself, and content in a way he never had been before. Jelaine was different too. She’d always been a fine girl on her way to becoming a remarkable woman, but she’d become…there’s no other way of saying it…a lady. Royalty, really.”

“And why would this make you so unhappy?”

“They were cooler to me. They talked to me and asked me how I was and even congratulated me on my marriage and on the birth of my daughter. They were not unfriendly. But somehow, their relationship with me was no longer something they wanted, but something they felt they were obligated to have.”

“They don’t love you anymore.”

“I don’t know if they love me or not. That’s the damnable thing. But if they do it’s just because I’m their brother and they have to. Aside from that, they started treating me as an obstacle to be handled. As part of the problem.”

“Part of what problem?”

“I don’t know! Part of whatever fucking problem they have! Excuse me.”

Now it was his turn to retreat to the bathroom. He closed the door, ran the water, and returned with another glass, filled only halfway. His sips were tiny, and controlled, but furious. He wasn’t crying—I don’t know if he was capable of it—but his eyes were glazed, and his hands trembling. The man was a captain of industry, one of the wealthiest human beings in the universe, and by dint of the business he supported quite possibly a sociopathic monster, but at this moment he was just a boy, upset that his siblings had excluded him from their secret club.

I gave him time to compose himself, and assessed his shadow, Mr. Wethers. The man remained stony, not an iota of concern or sympathy on his bland corporate features. Of course, open pity for the boss was probably a good way to get fired, and that would be a bad idea indeed when your boss owned the very planet where you lived. But this man’s ability to hide empathy, if he felt any, was extreme—better than his ability to hide self-consciousness, since he colored and looked away in discomfort the second he registered me looking at him. I remembered that he’d acted pretty much the same way with Skye, Jelaine, and Dejah. He certainly had trouble tolerating the casual attention of women. I wondered who had hurt him in the past, and just how deep the scars ran.

Philip said, “Is there anything else?”

I gave Mr. Wethers some relief from the unwelcome heat of my gaze, resuming my interest in his master. “Mr. Bettelhine, what are your responsibilities for the corporation?”

“I command about two hundred ongoing research and development projects on behalf of my father, the company CEO.”

“You develop weapons.”

“I research new technologies.”

“Which,” I pointed out, “you most often use in the development of weapons.”

“By other divisions. I’m more interested in mapping the regions of undirected potential. It’s understood, at the corporate level, that at any given time, approximately seventy percent of the projects I command will turn out to be blind alleys. It’s with the remaining thirty percent that I justify my budget.”

“Still, the practical applications of your researches have the potential to kill vast numbers of human beings.”

He rolled his eyes, tired of the conversation. “Counselor, do you honestly believe that I’ve never had this debate with myself? I contribute to an industry that gives people the ability to affect their own destinies. How they manifest that power is up to them. What does this have to do with the situation we’re in?”

He was right. I could have debated the morality of Bettelhine Family business practices with him forever, and never reached a conclusion satisfactory to him or to myself. I returned to the central thread of my investigation. “I’m aware that a number of your divisions have been shut down or handed over to the control of Jason and Jelaine, and that this is extremely irregular given your long service and Jason’s uncertain personal history. I am certain that you have approached your father to ask him why this is happening. Has he given you any answer that makes sense?”

His answer was stony. “He’s only said that the corporation must retool for changing conditions, and that everything will be made clear to me in time.”

“You’ve also said that you had more than one relationship with your father, one as a son and one as a corporate officer. What you just said sounds like the answer he’d give a corporate officer. Forgive me for asking, as I know this must be painful, but has he given you any answers as father to son?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. It’s been more than a year since he gave me any answers as father to son. I haven’t even been in the same room with him for three months. That’s what I’m doing here. I changed my schedule, and the schedule of my associate here,” he indicated Wethers, “in hopes of catching up with him and maybe getting some answers. When Father canceled his trip at the last minute, I thought I’d at least spend some time with Jason and Jelaine and get some answers from them instead. But you know how that’s worked out.”

“Have you done anything to make your father angry?”

“I’ve asked him that.”

“And he says?”

He recited the pat answers without inflection. “That he loves me. That he’s my father and that he’s proud of me. That I shouldn’t be so sensitive. That I’ll understand when I find out what’s going on.”

“Those sound like father-to-son answers.”

“They do,” he said, not believing me. “Don’t they?”

I didn’t know. I’d never had the chance to relate to my own parents as an adult. I had no way of knowing what normal was, either in general or what it meant inside a dynasty like the Bettelhines, let alone what it meant for Hans Bettelhine in particular. Philip Bettelhine claimed to perceive a change, but had there really been a change? Was Hans really reassuring him, or just putting him off? How could I know, from this remove, when Philip could not after a lifetime of knowing all the people involved?

I decided to attack the problem from another angle. “Mr. Bettelhine, you mentioned a wife and daughter. How’s your family life?”

“My wife, Carole, took the kids and left me six months ago.”

“It must be unusual to divorce a Bettelhine on this planet.”

“Not for another Bettelhine. She’s a distant cousin from the Outer Family—many degrees removed, I assure you, but still a connected woman. And as it happens, we’re not divorced, just separated. Neither one of us wants to deny the children the opportunities for advancement that go along with my own superior connection to the Inner Family.”

“Would you mind telling me why your marriage failed?”

He turned stormy. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. Asking is how I find out.”

Philip squirmed for a moment and then gave it up. “Emotional incompatibility.”

“Who alleged that?”

“Carole did.”

“Did she give any reasons?”

“You want to know? I’d made a habit of sleeping around. It’s an awfully easy thing for Inner Family people to do. A night with a Bettelhine is considered a major plum, for those outside the bloodline. Sex of any kind you prefer is always available, and you don’t have to take no for an answer, if you’re enough of a bastard to use some of the options available to us.”

Now, that was an interesting moral construction. “Are you, sir?”

“That kind of a bastard?” He grimaced in self-disgust. “No. I’m just the everyday ordinary philandering kind of bastard. I don’t force anybody into anything. I just get offers and I think, why not?”

“I assume that your wife had an answer for that.”

“She’s a Bettelhine, and has her own pride to uphold. She gave me three warnings, which I disregarded three times, and then walked out on me.”

“You sound proud of yourself.”

“Thanks to my own stupidity, I was. I’m not anymore. And what does this have to do with anything that happened here tonight?”

“I’m wrapping up. So what you’ve told me is that in the last couple of years you’ve lost, by your reckoning, your brother, your sister, your wife, your life as family man, your relationship with your father, and much of your place in the family business?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be unfair to note that some people, pressed beyond all emotional endurance by such a series of blows, would look at all that loss and come to regard it as the result of a conspiracy against them?”

He was silent for a moment. And then the anger left him all at once, replaced with an earnestness that did not suit him nearly as well. “I don’t know what Jason and Jelaine are up to. I don’t know how it involves the Khaajiir, or my father, or you, or this Shapiro bitch. I don’t know why people are committing murders involving silly ancient weapons. It all escapes me, every bit of it. And if we are being quarantined or held hostage, as you believe, the reason escapes me even more. I don’t understand it, not any of it. I just want to know why I’ve been shut out and whether any of this is good or bad for the Family as a whole. I want that much security, at least. Will that finally answer your questions?”

Damned if I didn’t, at least a little bit, feel sorry for him. “Just one more issue,” I said, “regarding something you said before, something you never finished explaining to my satisfaction. Why would you believe terrorist action against your family ‘impossible’?”

With that, Vernon Wethers stepped away from the wall and, demonstrating an economy of movement that suggested many, many previous opportunities to stand between his employer and an unwanted question, helped Philip Bettelhine to his feet. The wormy little bastard didn’t even say anything about the matter being classified, or the questioning being over. He just hustled Philip out of there with about as much personal acknowledgment as he would have afforded any other misplaced obstacle.

Once Philip was safely on the other side of the door, Wethers whirled at me and pointed a long, narrow finger in my face. “Be careful, Counselor. I know you have Jason and Jason and the old man protecting you, but this is still Xana. We know how to deal with visitors who offend us.”

I’ve never enjoyed being pointed at. In an instant I had closed one fist around that finger and another around his wrist behind it. It would have been the work of another instant to leave him screaming with broken bones, and I inflicted just enough pain to make sure he knew it. “What did your people do to Bard Daiken?”

The ghost of a smile, superior and infuriating and pregnant with knowledge, tugged at the corners of his lips. “Something you don’t want done to you. Something Philip can do by whispering the order in the right ear. Something I’d find funny as hell and revisit in my old age whenever I needed reminder of the moments that gave my life meaning. Let me go.”

I maintained the painful grip and penetrating eye contact for another ten seconds, but this was his place of power, not mine.

I released him.

He massaged his wrist with his spare hand, gave me a further dismissive look, and turned toward the door.

It would have been a fine exit for any villain.

But just as he entered the narrow hall between the suite’s main room and the door to the main parlor, something went for his throat…