“I see.”
“You can’t be too careful these days, especially a man in such a high position of trust as you are.”
“Rather,” said Wilcox, smiling as he watched the waiter open the first bottle of wine.
CHAPTER 34
Dorik Harbin looked around the spare one-room apartment. Good enough, he thought. He knew that in Selene, the lower the level of your living quarters, the more expensive. It was mostly nonsense: you were just as safe five meters below the Moon’s surface as you were at fifty or even five hundred. But people let their emotions rule them, just as on Earth they paid more for an upper floor in a condo tower, even though the view might be nothing more than another condo tower standing next door.
He had been tense during the flight in from the Belt. After leaving the crippled Shanidar with an HSS tanker, he had received orders from Grigor to report to Selene. They provided him with a coffin-sized berth on an HSS freighter that was hauling ores to the Moon. Harbin knew that if they were going to assassinate him, this would be the time and place for it.
Apparently Grigor and his superiors believed his claim that he had sent complete records of Shanidar’s campaign of destruction to several friends on Earth. Otherwise they would have gotten rid of him, or tried to. Harbin had no friends on Earth or anywhere else. Acquaintances, yes, several people scattered here and there that he could trust a little. No family; they had all been killed while he was still a child.
Harbin had sent a rough ship’s log from Shanidar to three persons he had known for many years: one had been the sergeant who had trained him in the Peacekeepers, now retired and living in someplace called Pennsylvania; another, the aged imam from his native village; the third was the widow of a man whose murder he had avenged the last time he had visited his homeland.
The instructions he had sent with the logs—a request, really— were to give the data to the news media if they learned that Harbin had died. He knew that if Grigor received orders to kill him, no one on Earth would likely hear of his death. But the faint possibility that Shanidar’s log might be revealed to the public was enough to stay Grigor’s hand. At least, Harbin estimated that it was so.
It would have been easier to keep his murder quiet if they’d killed him on the ship coming in, Harbin thought. The fact that he was now quartered in this one-room apartment in Selene told him that they did not plan to kill him. Not yet, at least.
He almost relaxed. The room was comfortable enough: nearly spacious, compared to the cramped quarters of a spacecraft. The freezer and cupboards were well stocked; Harbin decided to throw everything in the recycler and buy his own provisions in Selene’s food market.
He had his head under the sink, checking to see if there were any unwanted attachments to his water supply, when he heard a light tap at his door.
Grigor, he thought. Or one of his people.
He got to his feet, closed the cabinet, and walked six steps to the door, feeling the comfortable solidity of the electrodagger strapped to the inside of his right wrist, beneath the loose cuff of his tunic. He had charged the battery in the dagger’s hilt as soon as he had entered the apartment, even before unpacking.
He glanced at the small display plate beside the door. Not Grigor. A woman. Harbin slowly slid the accordion door back, balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to spring aside if this woman pointed a weapon at him.
She looked surprised. She was almost Harbin’s own height, he saw: slim, with smoky dark skin and darker hair curling over her shoulders. She wore a sleeveless sheer sweater that revealed little but suggested much. Form-fitting slacks and soft, supple-looking boots.
“You are Dorik Harbin?” she asked, in a silky contralto voice.
“Who are you?” he countered.
“Diane Verwoerd,” she said, stepping into the room, forcing Harbin to swing back from the doorway so she could enter. “I’m Martin Humphries’s personal assistant.”