Three news-company cars were in sight but keeping a respectful five-hundred-meter distance from the Sepo. Lacey snorted, knowing that if only Crime Service had been present the reporters would have been swarming over the site. He had once knocked a pair of them down with his stunner when they ignored his demand to keep clear. The microscopic needles and their nerve-scrambling charges had done no permanent harm to the newsmen, but Lacey had been threatened with the Psycomp if he ever did it again. It was surprising that the Sepos were already at the scene. It was almost as if—
The security man raised his communicator and aimed it at the pickup cone on the nose of Lacey’s car. The microphone shroud covered the Sepo’s lips and the beam itself had too little scatter to be intercepted. The message rumbled out of the car’s loudspeaker perfectly audibly: “Shear off, you! This area is under Security control.”
The vehicle hesitated in the air, ten meters from the Sepo and slightly above him. The driver was balancing his fans as best he could, but the frail craft still wobbled as Lacey leaned forward with no attempt at secrecy and shouted, “Keep your pants on, friend, I’m from Crime Service and a murder site damned well isn’t closed to me.”
The Sepo lowered the communicator from his convulsing face and snarled, “I said shear off, bead brain! Don’t you know what ‘Security’ means?”
“Set me down,” said Lacey tightly to his driver. His face was gray and dreadful. Without hesitation the driver canted forward his twin joy sticks. The Sepo’s communicator fell as his right hand slashed down to his belt holster. Lacey’s driver tramped the foot feed, sending the car howling straight at the blue skullcap. The Sepo shouted and ducked as the screaming lift fans plucked away a bit of his jacket which billowed into their arc. The car hit the pad. It bounced from excess velocity but Lacey had timed the impact to leap clear at the instant steel scraped concrete. The Sepo was on his knees, scrabbling for the weapon he had dropped. Lacey took a half step forward and kicked. The gun was a silvery glitter that spun far over the roof edge and away.
“Oh dear Lord,” the security man blurted, sitting back and in his nervousness wiping his face with his skullcap. “If some civilian g-gets that—don’t you know what it was? That was a powergun!”
“No it wasn’t, friend,” said Lacey, satisfaction beginning to melt his face back into human lines. “Powerguns are approved for military use in war zones; not for police, not even for Sepos. And I sort of doubt that anybody’s going to use your toy after it fell thirty meters, anyway.” Then, with the same precision as before, Lacey’s toe caught the Sepo in the temple.
The stairs were open-work which scarcely interfered with the cameras in the big room below. The three hundred workers, mostly clerks and minor supervisors, were crowded into the western half of it while two technicians and the Tower’s medical unit worked hastily on the score of living casualties. The line of demarcation was not chance but another blue-capped Sepo whose nervousness evaporated when he saw Lacey and mistook him for a superior in the same organization. “I’m Agent Siemans, sir,” he announced with a flat-handed salute. “Kadel and I took over right away and kept everybody off the—him.”
Sieman’s gestures indicated the desk and body visible through the torn partition. Lacey nodded crisply, quite certain that “everybody” in the Sepo’s mind had included Crime Service investigators too. Sieman’s cross-draw holster was visible through his unclipped jacket. It held a fat-barrelled powergun.
Lacey quickly covered the private office with his hand scanner. The blast had seared everything in it so that the synthetic fibers of Follard’s suit had shrunk over his limbs and left the uncovered skin of his face and hands crinkled. The routing slip on the message capsule was clear, however, protected by the body which had fallen across it. Lacey flicked it upright to record the sender-recipient information. The name of the former—Lyall Mitchelsen, within Richmond Subregion—meant nothing to Lacey. Presumably it had meant a great deal to Follard or the magnate would not have opened the message out of sight of even his personal staff.