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  A narrow viewport into the front compartment slid open. Sharr peered back through it. “Say, Leader. What happened to your clothes?”

  “Shut up.” Voort took a seat back in the black-lined mini studio Turman had been using.

  “You lost them again?”

  “Leader to Mind Boy, shut up. You know I took them off dancing.”

  “So you stole your own clothes this time.”

  Voort sighed. “Yes, and I’ll get myself back someday.”

  Scut, Mulus, and the gold protocol droid boarded. Scut and Mulus took seats. The droid pulled her faceplate away, revealing the features of Myri. “It’s impossible to sit down in this thing.”

  Turman gave her a look that included no sympathy. “Lean against the back panel. Don’t fall down when we decelerate.”

  Myri reached into her black courier’s pouch and pulled out a small blaster pistol. “Anyone for a souvenir? The last blaster General Thaal will ever own.”

  Thaymes looked interested. “What do you want for it?”

  “An X-wing.”

  “Forget it.”

  “We’ll get you out of that.” Scut rose and began disassembling Myri’s exterior plates.

  Mulus gave Voort a pleading look. “Now can you help me understand what just happened?”

  Voort nodded. “I was confused for a long time. I didn’t understand why Thaal didn’t break and run to begin his transformation process. It clearly would take weeks or months, a time frame in which he’d be vulnerable to capture and discovery. Then I realized—he already had. Months ago. He’d been wearing makeup and traditional appliances to fool security measures while, underneath, he already was Thadley Biolan.”

  Mulus’s eyes lit up. “Ahhh. So at any point, he could take off his disguise and it would be impossible to prove he was the traitorous General Thaal.”

  “So we brought him here and gave him reasons to stay Thaal—greed for your gems, then a need for revenge against ‘Ton Phanan.’ On and on until we had everything set up and he couldn’t get away.”

  The vehicle rocked a little, then Wran appeared in the front viewport beside Sharr. “Leader. What happened to your clothes?”

  Voort reached forward and slid the viewport closed.

  Sharr slid it open again. “The other speeder and the speeder bikes are here.”

  Voort leaned back, interlacing his fingers behind his head. “Wraiths, let’s fly.” Then he looked skyward, though he had no idea whether Vandor-3 was in the direction of his stare. “All right, Bhindi. Now we’ve won.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CORUSCANT

  It was one of the most secure buildings on Coruscant. Shaped and colored like a hard-boiled egg cut lengthwise, it stretched the distance of two city blocks. Its every window was made of ship’s armor-grade transparisteel. Its every entrance was under the constant scrutiny of a droid guard working from one of its three security command centers.

  So when the squat redheaded man in the Alliance general’s uniform finished with the three-stage process to give him admittance to his own quarters, it was not odd that he looked a touch surprised to see a dead man in his social chamber, drinking his wine.

  The redheaded man paused as if collecting his thoughts while the door slid shut behind him. “General Loran.”

  Face Loran, dressed from neck to foot in his usual black, set his wineglass aside on an end table. “General Maddeus.”

  Borath Maddeus, head of Galactic Alliance Security, moved cautiously into his own home. “I thought you were dead. I’m very pleased to be wrong for once.”

  “You didn’t really.”

  Maddeus grinned, the expression broad across his face. “Well, I worried that this time it might be true. Your speeder explodes spectacularly, there’s genetic evidence of you all over the wreckage, your whole family disappears ...” He moved to sit on the sofa situated at a right angle to Face’s. “What on nine ice worlds happened that day?”

  “Three assassins. Two followed me into a marketplace, and I dealt with them. I got back to my speeder, got in, and asked my onboard droid brain if the vehicle had been tampered with. Turned out it had, so I did something that would have gotten me in deep trouble with my wife if it had turned out not to be a bomb. I cut myself and bled all over the controls and pilot’s seat.”

  “Hence the genetic evidence.”

  “Correct. I instructed the droid brain to wait one minute and then take off, fly to the nearest landing location up the avenue, and land, a task simple enough for its piloting functions to handle. I knew where the killers’ speeder had landed, so I assumed I was under observation from that position, and I slid out the viewport on the opposite side of my speeder. I figured if it was a bomb, it would detonate within seconds, while if it was a tracking or eavesdropping device, the killers’ speeder would remain in place long enough for me to creep close enough to get good identification details off it.”

  “And it took off, and exploded, without you.” Maddeus nodded, approving.

  “The killers’ speeder took off, and I spent the next few minutes comming my home and two or three people I’d seen recently in order to give them a heads-up.” Face’s voice turned grim. “The third killer went to my quarters. Broke in as slickly as I broke in here and confronted my wife in our bedroom, where she was packing to leave. She shot him, a twin burn to the gut. He took a while to die. She said he kept murmuring.”

  “Begging for mercy?”

  “Complaining that he couldn’t find a Wookiee. I assume he was in shock.” Face shrugged. “We disposed of the body, Wraith-style, and went into hiding. So I could carry out the final phases of my investigation on Coruscant.”

  Maddeus patted his breast pocket. “I have the official reports from Colonel Sorrel and others. They have some crazy details. Such as the fact that a Ton Phanan led the Wraiths. But no Wraiths have reported to me.”

  “They reported to me, once I let them know I was still alive. And Ton Phanan didn’t report to you since he’s been dead for decades.”

  “He really is dead.”

  Face nodded.

  “So who were your agents in the field?”

  “I’ll get to that. We have a new problem.” Face took a deep breath. “Here’s the bad news. Though General Stavin Thaal is currently shown as being in detention in an Alliance Security holding facility, he has, in fact, recently escaped. I intend to find him and recapture him today.”

  Maddeus’s face hardened into a mask of disbelief and disapproval. “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all.”

  Maddeus rose and fished his comlink out from a trouser pocket. “I’ll get a direct, live holocam feed of his cell. We’ll see about this.”

  “Don’t bother.” Face rose, too. “You know he escaped, because you helped him escape. General, I accuse you of being a member of the so-called Lecersen Conspiracy. Don’t reach for any other devices, as I’ll have to assume you’re going for a weapon.”

  Maddeus stared at his uninvited guest. Cold anger crept into his voice. “You know, Face, I’d heard that it was hard to stay friends with you. Now I find it’s true.”

  “You want to hear my presentation? I spent all morning working on it.”

  “Please.” Maddeus sat again.

  Face began walking, pacing back and forth a few steps in front of his host’s sofa. “You’ve been in Intelligence for about thirty years. It’s hard to find out many details of your career—your official record is full of redacted details. Not surprising. Mine’s like that, too. Anyway, among the redacted details are what you were doing throughout the Yuuzhan Vong War.”

  “I was building resistance cells on conquered and endangered worlds. Everyone knows that.”

  “Yes! But which worlds, and when?” Face stopped his lateral pacing and turned toward Maddeus. “Not on Coruscant. My old friend Baljos, who was here, coordinating the resistance, would have told me. But you were nearby ... You’re not in their official histories because, like most Int
elligence officers, you prefer not to be chronicled. And you were never in the army, so you aren’t on their official roster. But when Coruscant was about to fall, and then-Colonel Thaal floated the idea of setting up a resistance unit on Vandor-Three, you got behind the idea. Volunteered to help him set it up. I’m not speculating here—some of the old Pop-Dogs on Kuratooine are beginning to answer pointed questions. You’re an honorary Pop-Dog, and Thaal owes a lot of his hero status to you. And he returned the favor by pushing hard for you to be the head of GA Security when it was time to sweep Belindi Kalenda off to obscurity.”

  Maddeus fingered his comlink. His face was impassive.

  Face resumed his pacing. “No answer? No denial? Of course you won’t admit to anything. I might be recording. Anything you say might lead to your conviction. As you wish. Where was I? Oh, yes, appointment to head of GA Security. Thaal knew that you and he were two of a kind, greedy pragmatists, so it didn’t offend you at all when he offered to bring you into the Lecersen Conspiracy. Betray the Alliance, get a fat fee—say, a small planet, or a small continent on a rich planet, or whatever—for the simple task of betraying the Galactic Alliance. To a new Empire or the highest bidder.”

  Maddeus finally spoke. “How much of this bizarre theory have you discussed with others?”

  Face stopped, turned back toward Maddeus, and barked out a laugh. “Here’s where you’re hoping I’ll say, No, I’ve naïvely kept all these facts to myself so that if I can be eliminated, you can go on as before. General, I have full reports waiting on distant computers that will transmit if I fail to report in. And my wife knows. You know what she’ll do if you try something with me? She’ll go up in an X-wing and burn you to a cinder. And she’ll let our daughter handle the trigger. Good practice for a sixteen-year-old girl. It’s over, General. We found the special shipping crates HyperTech used to transport hypercomm units—with the coffin-sized shielded compartment in them, where your agent rode with anesthetic gas grenades. We found Thaal’s private moon where the captured crews of all those hijacked ships have been serving as slave labor. Colonel Gidders on Kuratooine didn’t take well to having Thaal lay the blame at his feet, so he’s telling everything he knows, including special smuggling favors that could only have come about with the help of the head of Galactic Alliance Security. You’re finished.”

  “Are you done with your speculating?”

  “Am I?” Face looked as though he were thinking it over. “No, not quite. We were just at the point where you turn traitor. Later, when the conspiracy is revealed, you realize that you and Thaal haven’t been outed by your surviving fellow conspirators. But you have to make sure that you’re safe. So you call me in. You say, I have some misgivings about General Thaal. Look into it, will you? The idea being that if there’s anything to find, I’ll find it. But if I don’t find anything, you and Thaal are as free as hawk-bats. And about as pretty. Where was I? Oh, yes. You were nice enough to give me a yacht, the Quarren Eye, with one of those compromised HyperTech hypercomm systems installed in it. I didn’t know for sure it was compromised, at first. But I’d never trust a comlink someone else handed to me, even if it’s wrapped up in a yacht. So what I did was form two Wraith groups, gave them nonoverlapping assignments, didn’t tell them about each other, while I sent you reports describing a third group made up of dead and fictitious Wraiths. And then ...”

  Face paused for dramatic effect. “I’m assuming that you hadn’t told Thaal you were doing this. And at some point you did. He’s not as subtle as you are, so he made arrangements to wipe out the Wraiths, me first. Assassins come after me and I go into hiding. Search orders, implicitly kill orders, go out for the Wraiths whose names have only ever been mentioned across the yacht’s hypercomm. And so I knew I had you. But in the first couple of days I was making sure my family wouldn’t be found out, one of my two real teams, following up on an investigation I’d told them to ignore, met the other one.” He shook his head, his expression rueful. “With sad results. Sadder for Thaal, though, in the long run. A vengeful Wraith is a very effective Wraith.”

  Maddeus’s voice emerged as a grumble. “I didn’t see that coming. The diverse Wraith units. That was a good tactic, Face. And you found us out.”

  Face’s eyebrows shot up. “That was a confession. Oh, sacred day. I really am recording, you know.”

  Maddeus shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you’re transmitting live, I can kill you and get out of this complex by routes you’re unaware of. I have safe houses, alternative identities, just like you. You’ve cost me a lot of money, Face, but not my freedom.”

  Face put on a mocking expression. “You know, killing me is the first part of that equation, and the hardest to accomplish. I can have my blaster in hand a lot faster than you can grab yours.”

  “My blaster’s already in hand.”

  Face started to reply, but was interrupted by a noise—the clearing of a throat behind him. Slowly, he turned to look.

  At the near end of the darkened hallway stood the silhouette of a burly man holding a blaster pistol. The man silently stepped forward. His face, coming into the glow rod light, was that of Stavin Thaal—rather, of the post-transformation Thadley Biolan. He wore civilian clothes, casual striped prints in red and yellow suited to an offworld tourist. He did not look happy.

  Face raised his hands and turned back to look at Maddeus. “Oh.” He chewed on his inner cheek for a moment. “Oops. The safe house where you were hiding him was here, wasn’t it?”

  “One floor down. With my personal security station, which is crewed around the chrono.” Maddeus held up his comlink. “I activated it—a casual button-press of a preset while I was fidgeting—and alerted my personal security crew.” Now he spoke into it. “Seal all exits from my quarters except the access to your station. Exterior holocams and security alerts set for maximum paranoia. We may be visited in a few minutes.”

  The voice that responded was buzzy but distinct: “Yes, sir.”

  Maddeus stood. “Stavin and I are going to leave now, Face. They’ll find your body when they break in. Your wife can go up in as many X-wings as she likes. She’ll never know where to shoot. Stavin, shoot him. Then we can go out and kill your wife if you like.”

  The former head of the army took a step into the social room, coming fully into the light. “I don’t really want to.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t ... I don’t feel well.” Thaal reached up to his neckline, tugged ... and his facial features and hair peeled away, revealing a different man. He was far younger than Thaal, pleasant-looking, smiling. “Now I feel better.”

  Face lowered his hands. “Surprise.”

  Hours later, the sun was just cresting the nearest wall of skytowers when Face Loran walked, jauntily, from the main entrance to the vast, circular Senate Building, seat of Galactic Alliance government.

  Thirteen people waited for him, seated on stone benches a hundred meters out in the plaza. Face waved and headed their way, navigating through pedestrian cross-traffic. He sometimes skipped like a child when he had an open stretch of permacrete before him.

  He wrapped himself around his wife and daughter, then turned toward the others. “I can’t believe you waited all this time.”

  Myri looked forlorn. “We were bored. Nobody was shooting at us. So we came here.”

  Piggy nodded. “It’s the boss’s duty to entertain us. You’ve let us down.”

  “Well, I’ll entertain you now. Where are the speeders?”

  Sharr perked up. “Should I steal us some?” At Face’s arched eyebrow, he relented. “They’re this way.” He led the Wraiths westward across the plaza.

  “So.” Face took a look around, making sure that no other pedestrians were close enough to hear, pausing when any stranger momentarily moved too close. “After a full night of briefing and debriefing and explaining, I spent a couple of hours telling Chief of State Dorvan what we’ve been up to. I left out lots of details. Like your names.”

 
; Dia, tucked under his arm, looked up at him. “And?”

  “And he offered me a desk job.”

  She smiled. “Head apologist for the Chief of State?”

  “Head of Galactic Alliance Security.”

  “Excellent.” That was Trey, and Face felt thumps against his back, pats of congratulation.

  Dia made her face stern. “If you take it, you have to treat it as a desk job. No shooting. No personal spying.”

  He leaned to kiss her. “You’re the only one I want to spy on.”

  “Deal.”

  “And I plan to accept the job. Now that I know my wife won’t burn me to a cinder.”

  “Bhindi would be pleased.” Sharr’s voice was suddenly just a touch hoarse. “The way it ended. A venomous reptile rooted out from a position of high influence.”

  Myri sounded matter-of-fact. “Piggy getting back in dancing shape. She’d like that, too.”

  Drikall sounded more cheerful. “Jesmin has the monkey-lizard of her black-market investigation off her back.”

  Thaymes cocked his head, thinking. “Zehrinne Thaal gets her ‘dead husband’s’ possessions. And things of Thadley Biolan’s she can prove were Thaal’s. A blow for vengeful discarded wives everywhere.”

  Piggy summed it up. “Not a bad set of results for Wraith Squadron’s last hurrah.”

  “About that ...” Face fell silent as they passed through the plaza’s western exit arch, between two uniformed security troopers. “Keep it up, guys. I’m your new boss. Just saying.” When the Wraiths were far enough away, he continued. “This wasn’t a Wraith Squadron mission. Wraith Squadron ceased to be when it was decommissioned three years ago.”

  “True.” Jesmin looked unconcerned.

  “This was an action by a group of concerned civilians who never revealed who they were.” They moved onto the ramp up to the next level of pedestrian walkways, and Face continued. “As such, it doesn’t have to be your last hurrah.”