“I can tell you that their cover identities were bulletproof,” Haider continued. “Either they have an incredible counterfeiter, or their fake IDs are real.”
Which would mean they were connected to someone local with a lot of power.
“Did you record the meeting?” Matias asked.
And that right there was the difference between being born on Rada or off planet. Of course Haider had recorded the meeting. All of them knew it. What Matias was really asking was to see the recording, but demanding access to another family’s private business dealings would be the height of rudeness.
Haider stared into space for a couple of long breaths. “I forwarded it to your in-boxes.”
Her implant chimed, acknowledging the receipt. They would have to find a secure terminal to view it.
“Hilariously, they demanded that we erase it.” Haider chuckled. “You have what you need. Go forth, brave heroes, track down the traitors, and recover your data so you can pay me. I wouldn’t recover the spouses, however. Seems like a lost cause.”
True, she thought.
Haider waved them off. “You can take the elevator down.”
“No thanks,” Matias said. “The aerial will be just fine.”
He headed to the window. Ramona followed him, paused, and tossed a brief message to Haider’s in-box from her implant.
“What’s this?” Haider asked.
“One of my childhood friends. Two children, natural conception for both. Both born with the Tarim mutation. They are now five and three. I thought you and Damien could use someone to talk to, and Olivia Solis has gone through this gauntlet.”
Haider smiled. “Maybe I won’t take all of your money. Just some of it. Happy hunting, she-wolf.”
She nodded and leaped across the void into the cargo hold.
CHAPTER 3
New Delphi perched on top of a towering plateau, its glittering skyscrapers and beautiful office buildings vying for space with residential apartments and houses, cushioned in greenery. On the side of the cliff, five hundred meters below the city level, lay the Terraces. Seven platforms, each about a couple of kilometers long and two hundred meters at their widest, they curved from the living rock one under another, like scalloped mushrooms from a massive tree trunk.
The Terraces offered views, shopping, and restaurants, all catering to residents of the city longing for a brief return to the simpler, slower life in the provinces of their childhood. Here service was relaxed, the furniture was rustic, and the food tasted homemade.
Matias touched down in a small private parking lot on the Fourth Terrace, next to a quaint café protruding from the cliff. Its front wall offered the familiar carved facade of reddish rock etched with acid to a paler shade particular to the Terraces, where any new building space had to be reclaimed from the plateau. A hipped roof with upturned corners, lined with high-tech solar shingles made to resemble blue clay, shielded the building from quick torrential rains that soaked Dahlia year around. The café looked like it had always been there, but he was 100 percent sure he hadn’t seen it the last time he’d visited.
The moment he’d swung the aerial from the Davenport building, they’d agreed they required a secure terminal. Haider was a shrewd rival. Even if he planned on making money from their deal, he wouldn’t pass up a chance to pry the lid off their servers and rummage through their contents. There was no telling what fun surprises he had stuffed into the file he sent to their in-boxes. If they were dumb enough to open it without precautions, they would deserve everything they got.
They needed a scrubber and a quiet, private location to view their little gift. Ramona told him she had one. Matias had one as well, but if his lifelong enemy wanted to invite him to view one of her safe houses within the city, he would be a fool to decline. Learning more about the Adlers only benefited the Baenas in the long run. You never knew when things like that would come in handy.
Ramona’s door slid open, and she climbed out of the aerial. A moment later Matias followed. Sunlight spilled from the clear sky, warming the tiles under his feet. A hundred meters away, the Terrace ended, guarded by a stone rail, and beyond it an ocean of air stretched, the fertile plain far, far below rolling into the hazy distance toward the pale-blue mountains at the horizon. Wind buffeted Matias’s face, bringing with it the aroma of cooked meat, spices, and the scent of fresh bread.
How long had it been? A year? No, closer to eighteen months. Enough time for a new restaurant to be carved out of the living rock and wrapped in a facade of Dahlia clay.
The last few months had been a tense, focused blur.
Back when Matias had first left Rada, one of the jobs had taken him down to a planet where the natives raced large, fast herbivores. The animals were used to dodging predators. Despite their size, they were skittish and required small screens on the sides of their heads restricting their vision to the narrow tunnel directly in front of them or they would veer off course.