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the right touch of elegance, of class, and served to bring everything together.
    By contrast, Dietrich could smell himself and was afraid that she could too. As his eyes met hers Dietrich wondered if she'd planned it that way on purpose, or just took her job so seriously that everything was a top priority. Both, probably. She was like a biological artifact, frozen in a glacier for a thousand years and only recently come to life. Patient and very cold. Well, there was no help for it. He'd tell the truth and hope for the best.
    â€œThe raid didn't go well.''
    Carla nodded her agreement. "I'm glad you admit that. A well-intentioned failure can be forgiven, but stupidity, never. What went wrong?"
    The German was careful to keep his voice level and calm when he spoke. He'd dealt with officers like her. One sign of weakness, one indication of uncertainty, and they came in for the kill.
    "The problems started the moment we hit the LZ. We hoped the dissidents would fire first and give us an excuse to grease them. They didn't. As we approached their encampment, I saw Neely and put him down."
    Dietrich shrugged apologetically. "I was trying for Neely's heart, but gut shot him instead. I was about to finish die job when Corvan arrived. In the meantime one of the dissidents took a shot at my troops and they killed her."
    Dietrich frowned. "Corvan arrived just in time to broadcast the bastard's dying words. Scary, but no harm done."
    Carla nodded in apparent agreement as she stood and came around to the other side of her fastidiously clean desk. She aimed a remote control at the far wall and pressed a button.
    "Yes, all things considered, a very objective report, and correct in all but one respect. Harm was done."
    A section of the wall slid aside to reveal a holo monitor which faded from black to a robo-cam view of Corvan kneeling over Neely.
    "The public never saw this shot," Carla said by way of explanation. "Corvan's engineer chose the shot provided by his eye cam instead. But our people taped the signal off-air and ran a computer-augmented video analysis of it just to be safe. Here's what they found."
    Dietrich watched a transparent dot appear over a small section of the video, then zoom outward to fill the screen. The engineers had slowed the video so that the frames went by one at a time. Dietrich watched Neely's hand jerk its way toward Corvan's, and there, just before the two hands met, a glimpse of something white.
    Carla triggered a replay and nodded in response to Dietrich's unasked question. "That's right. Neely slipped something into Corvan's hand."
    They both watched the scene jerk by again and fade to black. Carla let the silence build as the monitor disappeared into the wall, and she took her seat.
    Dietrich sighed internally. There was more, and she wanted him to ask, to place himself in the subordinate role. "And?"
    "And," Carla replied, "Neely and Corvan were friends once. That was a long time ago, before Corvan achieved surgical celebrity status and Neely joined the lunatic fringe. And while there's no evidence that they stayed in touch, it's safe to say that Corvan feels sympathetic toward Neely."
    Dietrich scowled. "Sympathetic? Hell, Corvan damned near eulogized the bastard on worldwide television."
    Carla smiled. "A trifle exaggerated perhaps, but yes, his sympathies are with the poor downtrodden masses. As he sees them anyway. According to our psychologists, Corvan has a somewhat compulsive personality. He's fixated on a vision of journalistic purity which he believes will right the world's wrongs. A little gift from his mother, I believe. So, whatever it was that Neely gave him, we can expect Corvan to take it seriously."  
    "So what should we do?"
    Carla's long white ringers went up to tug at her right earring. "When you return to your quarters, you'll find that you’ve been detached from the WPO and assigned to my personal staff. I'm going to be busy for the next couple of days, but in the meantime I