“He . . . he let her go!” Sarda stammered. “He had her cold. I heard everything. She’d as good as confessed. Another half hour, and we’d have found out all we needed to nail them and get the money back.”
“Yes, you could have gotten the money back . . . and lost her,” Kieran said to Sarda. “I presumed you’d rather have both. Actually, I think you can do better still.”
Sarda’s sails crumpled, windless. “What are you talking about?” he retorted.
“Hey, trust the man,” Mahom told him. “If I know anything, it’s that the Knight has his reasons.”
“You don’t remember anything about her,” Kieran said.
Sarda shook his head. “Of course I don’t. All I do know is that I’m in a hole for five million, and you just let somebody walk away with it.”
“That’s the problem. You don’t know how it was with you two.” Kieran waved a hand at the comscreen on Alazahad’s desk. “Replay that call you made to her earlier this evening and look at it,” he said. “Look at what it’s telling you. And I saw it all over her face here again just now.”
“What? You saw what? What are you talking about?”
“She’s in love with you, man! You! The Leo she used to know, before he started having ideas about getting even with his other self, and turned into someone else. She didn’t get mixed up in this for a share of any money. She did it to keep the man she had then. Was she supposed to trust this process that everyone said would create the same person, identically? How could she? He didn’t even trust it himself.”
Sarda gave June a bemused look, asking if it made sense to her. For the moment she could only return a shrug. “But you didn’t talk about anything like this,” he objected, looking back at Kieran.
“I didn’t have to. Her face and body language said it all—plus the fact that she came here. . . . She came because she thought she would find someone she’d lost.”
“Well, maybe.” Sarda seemed none the wiser. “But I still don’t see what good it did, letting her go like that. Why do it?”
Kieran sighed patiently. “When you called her earlier, she assumed you had to be the original, as we intended. But even in that short time she saw the Leo that she’d known at the beginning, who didn’t know anything about this scheme that got dreamed up later—because that’s exactly who you are. She thought that the original had somehow reverted to what he had been. But then she realized that her Leo—the one she came here to find—is now the enemy, itching to get even.” Kieran gestured toward Sarda in a way that said the proof couldn’t be any plainer than that. “She couldn’t deal with it for the moment, so she left. If we’d wheeled you in at that point, it would have created a fight between the two of you that could never have been mended. Oh, sure . . . a half hour with the hot irons and the thumbscrews, and we could probably have learned all we needed to take everything to Herbert and Max, stop whatever Elaine’s friends are up to, and recover your five million. But whatever you and Elaine had would have been lost. And I happen to think it was something worth trying to hang onto, Leo.”
June was staring at Kieran with a look that seemed to say that no matter how long she knew him, he would never cease to amaze her. Alazahad had no idea what was going on, and was happy to leave everything to the rest of them.
Sarda looked at Kieran uncertainly, apparently expecting more. Kieran’s manner suggested that he’d said all that should be necessary. “So what happens now?” Sarda asked finally, at the same time glancing at June to ask if he had missed something.
“We wait for her to come back,” Kieran said, as if it should have been obvious. “Well, not literally here, of course. I assume she’ll call.”
Sarda was still not really any nearer. “How do you know she’ll do that?” he asked.