The Third Claw of God (27 page)

“And then?”

“One day after that ball I told you about, which is best described as a restrained disaster, Jelaine told me she’d made arrangements with Father to let her take Jason on an extended tour offworld. She said there were things Jason needed to deal with, leftover business from his days away. She said she was going to make sure he got the chance. Now, me, I absolutely hated the idea, since leaving Xana the first time had been such a disaster for him, but Jelaine seemed sure, and she’d already gotten Father’s approval, so it was going to happen, one way or the other.”

“Did you ask your father why he’d said yes?”

“He told me he wanted his son back.”

“And you?”

“I wanted my brother back.”

“But you were still against the idea.”

“I considered Jason toxic,” Philip said. “I’d seen him, a favorite son, flit off and subject himself to horrors the rest of us couldn’t even imagine. I saw him come back a shell of himself, not connecting with us or with anything around him. And now I saw him sucking Jelaine in too. Don’t you see? I was afraid of losing her too!”

“How did you deal with that?”

“Since I couldn’t stop them from going, I offered to jettison my responsibilities and come along. I said it was to help support Jason, but by then I didn’t think anything could help Jason. I was more interested in being the voice of reason, standing between him and Jelaine. But Jelaine said no. She said she knew what she was doing. She said I should trust her. And so I did what a brother does. I let her go and hoped for the best.”

“And is…‘the best’…what you got?”

He clenched his fists, opened them, then massaged each hand with the other, as if subconsciously washing them. “When they returned, Jason was a new man, centered, secure in himself, and content in a way he never had been before. Jelaine was different too. She’d always been a fine girl on her way to becoming a remarkable woman, but she’d become…there’s no other way of saying it…a lady. Royalty, really.”

“And why would this make you so unhappy?”

“They were cooler to me. They talked to me and asked me how I was and even congratulated me on my marriage and on the birth of my daughter. They were not unfriendly. But somehow, their relationship with me was no longer something they wanted, but something they felt they were obligated to have.”

“They don’t love you anymore.”

“I don’t know if they love me or not. That’s the damnable thing. But if they do it’s just because I’m their brother and they have to. Aside from that, they started treating me as an obstacle to be handled. As part of the problem.”

“Part of what problem?”

“I don’t know! Part of whatever fucking problem they have! Excuse me.”

Now it was his turn to retreat to the bathroom. He closed the door, ran the water, and returned with another glass, filled only halfway. His sips were tiny, and controlled, but furious. He wasn’t crying—I don’t know if he was capable of it—but his eyes were glazed, and his hands trembling. The man was a captain of industry, one of the wealthiest human beings in the universe, and by dint of the business he supported quite possibly a sociopathic monster, but at this moment he was just a boy, upset that his siblings had excluded him from their secret club.

I gave him time to compose himself, and assessed his shadow, Mr. Wethers. The man remained stony, not an iota of concern or sympathy on his bland corporate features. Of course, open pity for the boss was probably a good way to get fired, and that would be a bad idea indeed when your boss owned the very planet where you lived. But this man’s ability to hide empathy, if he felt any, was extreme—better than his ability to hide self-consciousness, since he colored and looked away in discomfort the second he registered me looking at him. I remembered that he’d acted pretty much the same way with Skye, Jelaine, and Dejah. He certainly had trouble tolerating the casual attention of women. I wondered who had hurt him in the past, and just how deep the scars ran.

Philip said, “Is there anything else?”

I gave Mr. Wethers some relief from the unwelcome heat of my gaze, resuming my interest in his master.

“Mr. Bettelhine, what are your responsibilities for the corporation?”

“I command about two hundred ongoing research and development projects on behalf of my father, the company CEO.”

“You develop weapons.”

“I research new technologies.”

“Which,” I pointed out, “you most often use in the development of weapons.”

“By other divisions. I’m more interested in mapping the regions of undirected potential. It’s understood, at the corporate level, that at any given time, approximately seventy percent of the projects I command will turn out to be blind alleys. It’s with the remaining thirty percent that I justify my budget.”

“Still, the practical applications of your researches have the potential to kill vast numbers of human beings.”

He rolled his eyes, tired of the conversation. “Counselor, do you honestly believe that I’ve never had this debate with myself? I contribute to an industry that gives people the ability to affect their own destinies. How they manifest that power is up to them. What does this have to do with the situation we’re in?”

He was right. I could have debated the morality of Bettelhine Family business practices with him forever, and never reached a conclusion satisfactory to him or to myself. I returned to the central thread of my investigation. “I’m aware that a number of your divisions have been shut down or handed over to the control of Jason and Jelaine, and that this is extremely irregular given your long service and Jason’s uncertain personal history. I am certain that you have approached your father to ask him why this is happening. Has he given you any answer that makes sense?”

His answer was stony. “He’s only said that the corporation must retool for changing conditions, and that everything will be made clear to me in time.”

“You’ve also said that you had more than one relationship with your father, one as a son and one as a corporate officer. What you just said sounds like the answer he’d give a corporate officer. Forgive me for asking, as I know this must be painful, but has he given you any answers as father to son?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. It’s been more than a year since he gave me any answers as father to son. I haven’t even been in the same room with him for three months. That’s what I’m doing here. I changed my schedule, and the schedule of my associate here,” he indicated Wethers, “in hopes of catching up with him and maybe getting some answers. When Father canceled his trip at the last minute, I thought I’d at least spend some time with Jason and Jelaine and get some answers from them instead. But you know how that’s worked out.”

“Have you done anything to make your father angry?”

“I’ve asked him that.”

“And he says?”

He recited the pat answers without inflection. “That he loves me. That he’s my father and that he’s proud of me. That I shouldn’t be so sensitive. That I’ll understand when I find out what’s going on.”

“Those sound like father-to-son answers.”

“They do,” he said, not believing me. “Don’t they?”

I didn’t know. I’d never had the chance to relate to my own parents as an adult. I had no way of knowing what normal was, either in general or what it meant inside a dynasty like the Bettelhines, let alone what it meant for Hans Bettelhine in particular. Philip Bettelhine claimed to perceive a change, but had there really been a change? Was Hans really reassuring him, or just putting him off? How could I know, from this remove, when Philip could not after a lifetime of knowing all the people involved?

I decided to attack the problem from another angle. “Mr. Bettelhine, you mentioned a wife and daughter. How’s your family life?”

“My wife, Carole, took the kids and left me six months ago.”

“It must be unusual to divorce a Bettelhine on this planet.”

“Not for another Bettelhine. She’s a distant cousin from the Outer Family—many degrees removed, I assure you, but still a connected woman. And as it happens, we’re not divorced, just separated. Neither one of us wants to deny the children the opportunities for advancement that go along with my own superior connection to the Inner Family.”

“Would you mind telling me why your marriage failed?”

He turned stormy. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know. Asking is how I find out.”

Philip squirmed for a moment and then gave it up. “Emotional incompatibility.”

“Who alleged that?”

“Carole did.”

“Did she give any reasons?”

“You want to know? I’d made a habit of sleeping around. It’s an awfully easy thing for Inner Family people to do. A night with a Bettelhine is considered a major plum, for those outside the bloodline. Sex of any kind you prefer is always available, and you don’t have to take no for an answer, if you’re enough of a bastard to use some of the options available to us.”

Now, that was an interesting moral construction. “Are you, sir?”

“That kind of a bastard?” He grimaced in self-disgust. “No. I’m just the everyday ordinary philandering kind of bastard. I don’t force anybody into anything. I just get offers and I think,why not? ”

“I assume that your wife had an answer for that.”

“She’s a Bettelhine, and has her own pride to uphold. She gave me three warnings, which I disregarded three times, and then walked out on me.”

“You sound proud of yourself.”

“Thanks to my own stupidity, I was. I’m not anymore. And what does this have to do with anything that happened here tonight?”

“I’m wrapping up. So what you’ve told me is that in the last couple of years you’ve lost, by your reckoning, your brother, your sister, your wife, your life as family man, your relationship with your father, and much of your place in the family business?”

“Yes.”

“Would it be unfair to note that some people, pressed beyond all emotional endurance by such a series of blows, would look at all that loss and come to regard it as the result of a conspiracy against them?”

He was silent for a moment. And then the anger left him all at once, replaced with an earnestness that did not suit him nearly as well. “I don’t know what Jason and Jelaine are up to. I don’t know how it involves the Khaajiir, or my father, or you, or this Shapiro bitch. I don’t know why people are committing murders involving silly ancient weapons. It all escapes me, every bit of it. And if we are being quarantined or held hostage, as you believe, the reason escapes me even more. I don’t understand it, not any of it. I just want to know why I’ve been shut out and whether any of this is good or bad for the Family as a whole. I want that much security, at least. Will that finally answer your questions?”

Damned if I didn’t, at least a little bit, feel sorry for him. “Just one more issue,” I said, “regarding something you said before, something you never finished explaining to my satisfaction. Why would you believe terrorist action against your family ‘impossible’?”

With that, Vernon Wethers stepped away from the wall and, demonstrating an economy of movement that suggested many, many previous opportunities to stand between his employer and an unwanted question, helped Philip Bettelhine to his feet. The wormy little bastard didn’t even say anything about the matter being classified, or the questioning being over. He just hustled Philip out of there with about as much personal acknowledgment as he would have afforded any other misplaced obstacle. Once Philip was safely on the other side of the door, Wethers whirled at me and pointed a long, narrow finger in my face. “Be careful, Counselor. I know you have Jason and Jason and the old man protecting you, but this is still Xana. We know how to deal with visitors who offend us.”

I’ve never enjoyed being pointed at. In an instant I had closed one fist around that finger and another around his wrist behind it. It would have been the work of another instant to leave him screaming with broken bones, and I inflicted just enough pain to make sure he knew it. “What did your people do to Bard Daiken?”

The ghost of a smile, superior and infuriating and pregnant with knowledge, tugged at the corners of his lips. “Something you don’t want done to you. Something Philip can do by whispering the order in the right ear. Something I’d find funny as hell and revisit in my old age whenever I needed reminder of the moments that gave my life meaning.Let me go .”

I maintained the painful grip and penetrating eye contact for another ten seconds, but this was his place of power, not mine.

I released him.

He massaged his wrist with his spare hand, gave me a further dismissive look, and turned toward the door.

It would have been a fine exit for any villain.

But just as he entered the narrow hall between the suite’s main room and the door to the main parlor, something went for his throat…

13

The attack was so smooth, so graceful, so organic in its terrible precision, that for its first precious seconds my eyes and my mind lagged behind the moment, refusing to recognize his collapse against the wall as anything but a moment of pathetic clumsiness, brought on by exhaustion and the trauma we’d all been through in the last few hours.

Even when he grabbed for his throat for both hands, his blind fingers clutching at the black line that now banded his neck, I mistook his difficulty breathing for a heart attack, or a careless swallow that had sent saliva down the wrong pipe. His protruding eyes, his gaping mouth, the sudden terrible knowledge written on his face, my own dulled realization that something awful was happening to him—they were all inhabitants of that first second, so complete even in this the moment of their birth that there was no time to apply logic and consider where they might have come from.

I thoughtClaw of God and reached for him.

A burst of pain and I found myself propelled backward, aware only that I’d been struck in the jaw. By the time I tripped over the leg of the chair Philip Bettelhine had vacated only a couple of minutes before I’d figured out that the fist had belonged to Wethers, and by the time I realized to my intense dismay that I was going to fall I’d decided that the bastard must have faked whatever the hell he wanted me to believe was wrong with him, so he could catch me with a sucker punch. By the time I smashed into the floor with a force that summoned fresh pain to the same hip I’d bruised during the emergency stop, I was past wanting to kill him for getting past my defenses and well into the realm ofthat’s not what this is .