I decided to stick with my response to the paintings. "Interesting." (Actually, I could hardly have cared less, but I figured it's best to be polite about the crank beliefs of the president and chief executive officer of Telestrian Industries Corporation, South Pacific Operations.)

"Isn't it?" she agreed. "What I find even more interesting is that the legends of Lemuria indirecdy involve the islands of Hawai'i. Do you know who originally colonized the islands, Mr. Montgomery?"

I shook my head, and she answered her own question. "Polynesians from Tahiti. According to some beliefs, they crossed the ocean, looking for their own sunken continent. There are even some who claim that this sunken continent will one day re-emerge from the water, with the volcano of Haleakala as its highest mountain peak."

She smiled enigmatically. "It's interesting how different, seemingly unrelated factors are actually connected, if you look below the surface." She paused, and I knew she was getting down to biz; all this drek about lemurs and sinking continents was just preamble.

"Like you, Mr. Montgomery," Monot continued after a moment. "You seem to be one of those unrelated factors. Yet you're not unrelated, are you? You're actually connected, directly or indirectly, with many different… well, let's call them threads."

I snorted. A tight feeling had been building in my chest throughout her lemur prattle. Now I realized what that feeling was-anger. "Look," I said sharply, "I've had enough of all this vague, oblique and veiled-reference crap, you scan? Everybody's talking at me like I know a lot more about what's going down than I do, and it's torquing me off. Barnard did it. Ho did it, fragging Ryumyo did it, Harlech did it, and now you're doing it…"

I stopped in midpurge as Monot raised a slender hand. Her brows knotted in a frown. "Who?" she asked.

It took me a moment to get my derailed train of thought back on track. I ticked them off on my fingers. "Barnard, Ho, Ryumyo, Harlech-"

"Harlech," she repeated, interrupting again. "Who was that?"

I hesitated. There was something strange in Monot's expression-something that made me suspect she knew all too well, and didn't like it one bit. "Quentin Harlech," I told her. "He said to call him Quinn."

She went slightly pale, and she whispered something then, under her breath. It could have been a repetition of the name I'd given her, but in the order you'd find it in a 'puter database, last name first. Or it could have been something else. ("Big worm / bakeware" time again…)

"That's the slag," I confirmed. Even though I didn't know jack about what was going down, I kept a good dose of bluster in my voice. If something had knocked Monot off-stride, maybe I could use it to my advantage. "But what's the big deal?" I asked, "He's an elf, too."

Chantal Monot's pale eyes flashed with momentary anger. Then her professional control took over, and I watched as she forced herself to calmness. "He may be an elf," she said at last, "but elves don't speak with one voice. Particularly on an issue as important as this." (Important, neh? I filed that gem away for future reference.)

I shrugged. "From what I've read, TIC is in like this"-I held up crossed fingers-"with the Tir government. Sometimes, your corp's an instrument of policy for the Tir nation. And if that isn't speaking with one voice-"

She broke in again. "We may be an instrument of policy for the Tir's leadership" she corrected coldly, "not for the nation." (And I filed that one away, too. It didn't make any sense at the moment, but maybe later…)

Monot gazed out me window at Diamond Head. The rock face was washed with the ruddy light of early morning. After almost a minute she turned back to me. "You spoke with… Quinn Harlech, didn't you, Mr. Montgomery? What did he tell you?"

"It didn't make much sense," I told her truthfully. "He said he was going to blow the lid off something. Let him do it for all I care-it's no skin off my hoop."

Monot nodded slowly. "Did he say how?"

"Not as far as I could tell." Then I hesitated. "Now I think about it, he implied he'd already done it"

"And I assume he knew of your association with Gordon Ho."

I nodded at that one. "He knew, all right." He'd seen my deputy's badge-gone, now-and certainly seemed to know what it meant.

Apparently that wasn't good news. Chantal Monot looked like one troubled elf. After a few more moments of thought she sighed. "Thank you for coming in, Mr. Montgomery. I appreciate your candor."

I snorted. "If it's candor you wanted, you could have gotten it without the narcodart," I pointed out.

Monot at least had the grace to look a little embarrassed. "I apologize for that, Mr. Montgomery, but our operative"- she must have meant the biff with the bracers-"evaluated your mental condition as being dangerous, to her and to yourself." (Translation: scared to the point of drekking myself. Granted.) "She made the field decision to incapacitate you rather than risking something a lot more unpleasant for all concerned."

Okay, I could understand that If my job was to arrange a meeting with some wild-eyed spacecase who'd just burst out of an alley brandishing a gun, I'd probably have narked him in his tracks, too. That didn't mean I had to like it, though.

Monot pressed a key on the sophisticated telecom built into the desk. "A driver will take you anywhere you wish to go," she told me.

"Hold the phone," I said. "Is that it? You track me and dart me and bag me… and that's it? No more questions?"

Monot looked at me bleakly. "The questions I had are no longer relevant."

I think I blinked in surprise… and then again in understanding. "Aren't you even going to warn me to keep my nose out of things that are too big for me?"

The elf looked genuinely sad as she said, "I think it's far too late for that, Mr. Montgomery."

18

And so, yet again, I got to ride in a fragging Rolls Phaeton. It was almost too much deja fragging vu for me to handle. If the driver had run down the bullet-proof partition, turned round to me, and grinned with Scott's face, I'd have taken it in stride and offered him a fragging drink.

Once we were off the TIC facility grounds-the corp building looked just as wiz from outside as it did from in- the driver wanted to know where to take me. That took some deep thought. All the places I'd already flopped were blown, one way or another, and my invitation to a meet with Chantal Monot had interrupted my search for another. I chewed on it for a few minutes while the driver "orbited" Kapiolani Park. Finally, I gave up, and did what I probably should have done from the outset. I asked the driver.

Frag, it's not that illogical, is it? Cab drivers know all the best bars, the best restaurants, the best flops, and the best places to get into deep trouble. And when you get right down to it, a corp chauffeur's not that much different from a hack driver, is he?

I laid out my requirements to the chauffeur-low profile, no questions asked-and let him think on it. Not so much as a minute later he nodded his head, and we took off in the direction of Waikiki.

(Hold the phone: Wasn't getting the chauffeur involved a major breach of security? Well, yeah, talking solely in terms of fieldcraft, it was a drek-headed move. Speaking practically, though? If Monot and her colleagues at TIC wanted me dead, I'd be dead. If they wanted to know where I went, they'd had several hours to plant a tracer-inside some body cavity, if they wanted to make it secure-that I'd never be able to find. The way I had it figured, getting the chauffeur to help me out didn't increase my exposure any. In fact, it decreased it, by saving me from blundering into something unwelcome as I'd done the night before.)