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Wraiths had carried in the field.
    Another holoprojection showed a man in dark commando garments. He was dark-skinned, graying at the temples, intense interest in his eyes, his features just a little too diabolical to be beautiful. “I was Vyn Narcassan,” he said. “In my twenty-year career with Republic Intelligence, I successfully completed over a hundred covert missions. I couldn’t prevent Senator Palpatine’s rise to power or his subsequent reign as Emperor. But I could, and did, engineer my disappearance. And despite Imperial Intelligence’s burning need to silence me and extinguish all the secrets I learned—” the projection leaned forward as if to impart a confidence—“they never found me.” He drew back, his smile creating deep dimples beside his mouth, his expression one of a satisfaction so immense that it bordered on arrogance.
    Something about the projection jogged Donos’s memory, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He filed it away for future reference. Someday, when he was trying to remember something else entirely, the answer would bubble up to the surface of his mind and annoy him intensely.
    Farther along the series of black, ill-lit museum display halls—the decor an attempt, Donos thought, to edge visitors into the sort of paranoid mind-set appropriate to subjects such as Imperial Intelligence—the displays became more unsettling. As Palpatine took power, the Intelligence Division became a tool of terror and retaliation. Displays chronicled assassinations, kidnappings of Old Republic loyalists, tortures, subversions. An interrogation chamber was shown in great detail, actual holographic footage of a subject being questioned about a rumored insurrection. The replay showed the subject, a man of Chandrila, dying during questioning. The narrator finishing up commentary on the event pointed out that the insurrection was entirely imaginary.
    One display showed the longtime Intelligence head, Armand Isard, an aging man with an inhumanity to his eyes and features that were unsettlingly real even in holographic replay. Farther down the exhibition, another showed his daughter, Ysanne Isard, nicknamed Iceheart, a tall and elegant woman of formidable bearing, and told of her swift rise to power through two simple tactics: turning in her own father for treasonous thoughts and attracting the eye of the Emperor. After Palpatine’s death, she had even managed secretly to gain control of the Empire itself for a time.
    Face, his features buried under a wooly brown beard, lingered before the projection of Ysanne Isard for a long time, and Donos saw him shudder—a motion too slight for any but those who knew him best to notice. The Wraiths were aware that when Face was a boy star in holodramas, he’d actually met Iceheart, had even been invited to sit in her lap. Now Iceheart was dead, killed by Rogue Squadron’s own Tycho Celchu, and Donos knew the universe was better off without her.
    To some extent, Imperial Intelligence had died with her. To be sure, an organization with that name survived under thecoalition that had replaced Iceheart, but it was not managed with the same inventive ruthlessness that had characterized Isard and her father. The organization was still a danger … but to fewer and fewer people as the years went by.
    Instead of going out the exit at the end of the exhibition, the Wraiths turned about and went back the way they came, the better to give Targon a chance to view the displays again. As they passed the holo of Iceheart, Donos saw the Devaronian pilot pull up something held by a chain around his neck and press it to his forehead.
    “A lucky charm?” Donos asked.
    Targon nodded. “A coin of the Old Republic. It holds a lot of luck.”
    “How do you know?”
    “My brother was never shot down while wearing it. It’s better than anything else I have. He sent it to me when I joined the Academy. Better than my lucky carved bantha-bone. Better than my lucky belt buckle.