Ayt Mada motioned one of her Green Bone bodyguards over and asked him to bring her a phone. “You’ve done well, Lula,” she said. “I have what I need. Go home to your family. You won’t need to worry about the foreigner calling for you again.”
Lula dropped from the bench onto her knees and pressed her forehead to the wooden decking of the gazebo. “Thank you, Ayt-jen,” she choked out through tears. She sat up and saluted with trembling hands. “May the gods shine favor on you.”
The bodyguard returned and passed the handset of a cordless phone to the Pillar. Ayt was no longer looking at the other woman. She was flipping through a small book of notes as she dialed. The weeping courtesan might as well not exist anymore. As Lula rose to her feet and backed out of the gazebo for the last time, she heard Ayt speaking into the receiver. “Iwe-jen,” said the Pillar, “it’s time we made those arrangements we’ve been planning.”
CHAPTER
52
A Search Ended
the twenty-sixth year, fifth month
Niko entered the slum house in Coinwash and wrinkled his nose at the smell of urine in the stairwell. The poorest parts of Janloon were not as bad as some of the most desperate places he’d seen in his worldly travels, but they were still the sort of place nearly everyone would avoid, including Green Bones. Too dark to see green, as the saying went—literally in this case, as the lights were burned-out in the hallway.
The two Green Bone bodyguards that the Pillar had assigned to him followed close behind Niko up to the second floor, where he found the unit he was looking for and knocked. There was no answer, but he could sense someone inside. He knocked again. “Go away,” came a muffled voice from the other side. There was no lock on the door, so Niko pushed open the flimsy barrier and stepped into the room.
A middle-aged man in shorts and a stained T-shirt was slumped on the threadbare carpet in front of a dilapidated sofa, watching a small tube television that rested on top of an upside-down wooden crate. The smell of mold and stale beer pervaded the windowless space. Several empty liquor bottles lay discarded on the floor. The man glanced up at Niko with incurious hostility.
“Are you Betin Rotonodun?” Niko asked.
The drunk grimaced with one-half of his face. The other half remained slack. “No one calls me that,” he snorted. He looked away and took a swallow from the bottle of beer in his hand. “Who the fuck are you? Are you from the government?”
“I’m from the No Peak clan,” Niko said, “and I have some questions to ask you.”
That got the man’s attention. He jerked up straight and stared at Niko alertly now, his bloodshot eyes bulging to the size of lychees as they came to rest on the long string of jade beads around the visitor’s neck.
“You’re . . .” The man blinked twice and wet his lips. “You’re one of the Kauls.”
Niko motioned for his bodyguards to remain in the hall. He walked across the tiny room and turned off the television. Noticing a step stool against the wall, he moved it before sitting down on it, facing his interviewee, who remained where he was on the floor, still staring with disbelief. “You weren’t an easy person to find, Mr. Betin,” Niko said.
“Bero,” the man corrected sharply. “I never use that other name, and I don’t owe anything to the bastard who gave it to me. How do you know it?” His heart rate had shot up, even Niko could Perceive that, though he didn’t seem frightened, exactly. Unnerved. Perhaps excited. “Do you know who I am?”
Niko nodded. He took a digital voice recorder from his pocket and placed it on the edge of the crate next to the television. “You’re Catfish. You were a spy for the Espenian military who fed them information on the Clanless Future Movement for several years up until the Janloon bombing. After that, you disappeared from any records, so I assume you were whisked away with a new identity. But you used your legal name to apply for government assistance, so I knew you were back in Janloon.”
Bero gaped at him. Niko couldn’t blame him for being astonished. The Janloon bombing had been twelve years ago. The Clanless Future Movement still existed but had been ground down to dregs. The decades-long Slow War had exacted a staggering cost in money and lives in wars all around the world, but if it wasn’t quite coming to a decisive resolution, at least it was going into a state of dormancy, with Ygutanian retrenchment and negotiated bilateral withdrawal from overseas conflicts. The former spy probably figured no one would try to find him. Even the Espenian government seemed to tacitly agree with that assessment, since it had declassified most of its documents over ten years old.