"I think you're right. They're avoiding looking at you. Half of the other men in the place haven't stopped ogling you since we came in."

Yana's cold smile appeared. "You sure you want to handle this? I can take care of it myself, you know."

"I don't doubt that. But I'm the one they want to find out about."

In point of fact, Yana was a bit nervous. Not because of the three men at that table. She ate alpha males for breakfast. What made her nervous was the man she was with.

Victor Cachat. Her friend Lara, not long before she died, had made the quip that with Victor on your side, you don't need to make any bargains with the devil.

It was true enough. She saw the men at the table push aside their chairs and come to their feet. All three were large, muscular, and obviously experienced when it came to physical confrontations. They were probably all mercenaries.

She sensed a very slight motion in Victor's right arm and knew that he'd slid the pistol all the way down his sleeve. He'd be holding it there, on his wrist, with just one finger. One quick motion—very well practiced in simulation chambers, Cachat being Cachat—and the gun would be in his hand.

As three more babes in the woods are about to find out.

Jurgen Dusek leaned forward to study the recording Chuanli had brought him. The three men were now within two meters of the couple at the corner table.

They were almost certainly carrying weapons. One of them was, for sure. Jurgen could see the pistol butt peeking out from under his jacket. Careless of him. But in practice there was no chance he'd get accosted by the police—not in Neue Rostock—and as long as he kept the weapon technically out of sight the barkeeps at the Rhodesian wouldn't make any objection.

All three men had that certain sort of smile on their faces, that Jurgen recognized from long experience. Dangerous thugs, about to prove it once again, taking the first steps in a familiar dance. When the dance was over—clearly, they didn't expect it to take long—they'd have some new female company to enjoy and a punk would have learned his true place on the pecking order. Maybe he'd survive the experience, maybe he wouldn't.

Dusek now looked at the man still seated at the table. If McRae was carrying any weapon, it wasn't visible. There was no sign of the pistol that Thiêu had sold him. In fact, he seemed oblivious to the menacing trio approaching him. So far as Jurgen could tell, McRae hadn't noticed them at all. The good-looking blonde sitting across from him had spotted them coming, sure enough, but she didn't seem too twitchy either.

Chuanli had told him it was interesting.

"What's your name, sweetheart?" asked one of the three men, when they came up to the table.

Yana glanced at him, shook her head, and pointed at Victor. "Ask him."

Cachat didn't even glance at them. "She's my woman. Leave it at that." His tone of voice was that of a man thoroughly bored.

The man who'd made the initial advance began to bridle. "Listen, shithead, you—"

Victor slid his pistol into his hand. He brought it up, still seated, and shot the man in the chest. As he began to crumple, Victor rose, smoothly and easily, and shot him in the head. Twice. Then shot the man to his left, then the one to his right. Three shots each. The first center mass, then a double-tap to the head.

It all took maybe three seconds. Only one of his victims even got a hand on a gun, and he didn't succeed in pulling it out of its shoulder holster. When it was over, half the floor of the bar was covered in blood and brains and the other dozen or so patrons—all of them very tough people in their own right—were pale-faced with stunned surprise.

"Which word in 'she's my woman' does anybody in this bar have trouble understanding?" the gunman asked. He still sounded thoroughly bored.

"Jesus H. Christ," said Jurgen Dusek. "Run it again, Chuanli."

The crime boss watched the recording three times over. Each time looking to see . . . anything that would make that gunman seem like a human being. Or even a normal sociopath.

Nothing.

After watching the recording four times, though, Dusek understood what had happened. It wasn't that McRae was some sort of "fast gun." True, he'd figured out a way to get the pistol into his hand without anyone spotting it, and then he'd moved quickly and surely, with not a single wasted motion. But any man well trained, familiar with weapons and in good condition could have done the same.

No, the secret was mental. This guy was one of those very rare people who could kill at the proverbial drop of the hat. He hadn't needed the stages of emotional escalation that even hardened thugs required, as quickly as those stages might pass. With him, everything had been instantaneous. Recognition of threat, calculation that the threat was best handled ruthlessly, start the killing.

"Talk about a hardcase," he muttered. "No wonder Saint-Just tagged him. You talk to him afterward?"

"Yeah. I waited a bit, you understand. It took the barkeeps a while to clean everything up anyway. The three guys he shot weren't any complication. The working arrangement they had with Jozef was just providing him with occasional muscle."

Jozef Ortega was no more sentimental than any under-boss. He worked for Jurgen anyway. Chuanli had been waiting nearby and had been called in by the barkeeps as soon as the fight was over. He could have been there in thirty or forty seconds, but he stretched it out to five minutes. McRae would probably figure out the whole thing had been a setup, but there was no reason to make it obvious. That might even be a little dangerous.

The rest would have been routine. Clean up the place, quietly threaten whatever patrons—probably none—might have an inclination to shoot their mouths off, and then pitch the three corpses into the garbage disintegrator of the restaurant next door. Dusek owned the restaurant as well as the Rhodesian, and he'd provided it with a top-of-the-line disintegrator. And then paid bribes to the police and the sanitation department to have all the recorders and detectors disabled. Nobody except the people involved would ever know what happened to those bodies.

"Give Jozef a payoff for lost services from his three guys. Ex-guys. Just to keep him from having hard feelings."

Chuanli nodded. "And McRae?"

"Is he willing to talk further? Or is he holding a grudge?"

"Yeah, sure. Cold-blooded killer be damned, boss. He probably figured out we set it all up, but it's not like he suffered any damages. He's got to eat like anyone else—not to mention keeping that big blonde happy. And for that he needs to get some work."

Dusek pursed his lips. The remaining issue that had to be considered was whether this McRae fellow was actually an agent for . . .

It wouldn't be any government agency or corporate security service. Not, at least, of any government or corporations Dusek was familiar with. This guy was just plain too murderous.

But that still left the Ballroom as a possibility. Not likely, but it couldn't be ruled out altogether. Dusek had no loyalty to Mesa, but he also wasn't a fool. This planet was his place of business—a very profitable one, too—and keeping that business up and running required him to avoid pissing off the powers-that-were.

A triple killing, when the dead men were thugs themselves and had no important patrons or allies, wouldn't concern the Mesan authorities. Not one that took place in this district. But if there was any Ballroom connection, the official indifference would end abruptly. Twice in his life, Jurgen had seen what happened when Mesa took off the gloves and really went after someone in the seccy districts. "Due process" and "reasonable force" were meaningless noises. They'd think nothing of leveling entire city blocks and butchering everyone in them, just to kill one person they were after.