Over the last few months she’d begun to wonder if she was becoming conservative in her old age, hating change simply because it was change; refusing to acknowledge that society was altering around her. It surprised her, because if nothing else she considered herself a realist. Police forces always adapted to keep pace with the civilization in which they maintained order. Although more likely it was the increasing degree of political control exerted over Agency operatives that made her uncomfortable. She resented the notion that limits might be imposed over her own work; after so many years served to reach a virtually semiautonomous position it would be awful to be hauled back into the general accounting system.
“Like everyone else.”
“Excuse me?” Tarlo asked.
Paula gave her deputy a mildly irritated smile; she hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. “Nothing. Thinking aloud.”
“Sure,” Tarlo said, and returned to the menu.
His California attitude was something Paula could finally appreciate here. Tarlo merged perfectly into Venice Coast’s laid-back lifestyle. The two of them were sitting at a café table, under a broad parasol by the side of the Clade canal. Three hundred meters away, on the opposite side, was the back of the Nystol Gallery. Its sheer red-brick wall rose vertically out of the placid water, with only a single loading door on the lower floor, a meter or so above the black tide line; a couple of wooden mooring posts stood on either side of it, their white and blue stripes sun-scorched to near invisibility. Wide, stone-rimmed windows marked out the second and third floors, below an overhanging roof of red clay tiles. A row of thick semiorganic precipitator leaves were draped just below the guttering, as if some giant vine were growing out of the rafters. Fresh water was an expensive commodity in Venice Coast, by themselves the sieve wells drilled through the basement of most blocks couldn’t support the huge demand of the residents.
Paula’s seat was positioned so she faced the target building, while Tarlo was at right angles to her, giving him a view along the canal. In his white cap and loose orange and black linen shirt he seemed immune to the heat. Paula took off her suit jacket and hung it on the back of the chair before sitting down; her white blouse was clinging to her skin. Her wig was hot, she could feel the sweat pricking her brow, but she resisted the impulse to shift it around. A waiter from the café scowled at them from his seat just inside the doorway. When it was clear they weren’t going to go away, he sauntered over.
“Ah, uno, aqua, minerale, er natu—” Paula began.
The waiter gave her a pitying sigh. “Still or sparkling?”
“Oh. Still, please, chilled and with ice.” The Venice Coast waiters were normally contemptuous of anyone who couldn’t speak even a smattering of Italian.
Tarlo asked for a nonalcoholic beer and a bowl of smoked rasol nuts.
Both of them received a further look of utter derision before the waiter slumped his shoulders and walked back inside.
“Always feels good to blend right on in there,” Tarlo said. He put his sandaled feet up on the rusting iron railing that guarded the edge of the granite-cobbled pavement from the canal.
Paula checked her timer. “We’ll order more drinks in half an hour, then a snack after that. I’d like to have at least two hours here.”
“Boss, we have got the whole place covered by sensors, you know. You can’t get a carrier pigeon in there without us zapping it.”
“I know. Target review is important to me. I need to get a feel for the op.”
“Yeah.” Tarlo grinned. “So you keep telling me.”
If one good thing had come out of the Directorate becoming the Security Agency, it was the expanded intelligence base. For once, the news of Valtare Rigin purchasing a number of sophisticated and very restricted items of technology hadn’t come from any of Paula’s deep assets. Instead, Anacona’s special criminal bureau had been running a monitoring operation with local manufacturers who made dual use products. They ran financial checks on an industrial supply company that purchased some molecular resonance stabilizers with a very high power rating, the kind that could be used in large force field generators. It turned out the supply company was a shell, with its credit supplied from a onetime bank account on StLincoln.
The bureau tracked the shipment, which was routed through a number of blind drops, until a courier picked it up and delivered it to the gallery. That was when they called the Agency in.
Observation, backtracking, and communications monitors had shown them Rigin was acquiring a lot of dual use components. There were no actual weapons, but the pattern fitted one of Adam Elvin’s shipment operations exactly.
“He picked a good cover,” Paula said as she sipped her mineral water. “I’ll bet you Rigin’s lawyer claims that the components make up one of his EK works.”
“So why did he need to acquire them like this?”