"Emotions clutter up the mental landscape."
—Jericho
"Why can't we just try to sneak out the same way you got in?" asked Sable.
"Because we're surrounded," said Jericho patiently, without any hint of tension in his voice. They were standing at the center of the auditorium, and as they spoke Jericho kept a watchful eye on the various doors. "It was easy to pass as one of Bland's soldiers while I was in their midst, but this is a different situation. The second they spot Bland's body they'll know who I am, regardless of my uniform."
His obvious calm bothered Sable. Jericho had just killed a man half the planet worshiped, he was surrounded in a hostile city on a hostile world, he found himself in a tightly constricting time frame, he lacked any weaponry more effective than projectile and laser pistols—and yet he seemed totally unperturbed.
More than that, he seemed formidable.
"Well, there's no sense making it too easy for them," announced Jericho. "Give me a hand, Mr. Sable."
Jericho walked to the nearest of the dead guards and began undressing him. Sable got the idea immediately, and within two minutes five more laser-scorched naked bodies were added to the pile of Bland's hapless victims, completely indistinguishable from the rest.
They then removed Bland's clothing and, at Jericho's insistence, hung his corpse on an empty meathook.
"But why?" asked Sable.
"People tend to look down rather than up," said Jericho, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand as he returned to Sable's side. He then aimed his laser weapon at Bland's corpse and obliterated everything above the neck. "That ought to make him a little harder to identify."
Sable stared at him and shook his head, amazed. This was just business to Jericho, nothing more. He was simply attending to necessary details now, much as a grocery clerk would carefully lay out his produce for its best effect.
"All right, Mr. Sable," said Jericho. "Let's start figuring out how to get out of here. Obviously I can't disguise myself as Bland. And, just as obviously, I can't pretend to be one of the guards."
"I still don't see why not."
"Because then I wouldn't have had to let you live," said Jericho dispassionately. "No, the answer lies in your presence here. You're the cipher." He paused. "What are you doing here in the first place? Why aren't you in Amaymon?"
And suddenly Sable knew how they were getting out.
He searched his pockets and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. They had never returned his overnight bag, so he hadn't had an opportunity to change clothes or to pack the paper away.
"What's that?" asked Jericho.
"An order empowering me to extradite you to Amaymon," said Sable.
"For what crime?" asked Jericho, suddenly interested.
"The murder of Parnell Burnam."
"Good! Then we don't have to represent me as Bland's potential assassin."
"What do you mean—potential?"
"You don't think we can get out of here if they know Bland is dead, do you?" asked Jericho with an ironic smile.
"I don't—" began Sable. Then his eyes fell on the radio. "You're crazy. It'll never work!"
"I heard enough of his voice to mimic the tone," said Jericho. "You're going to have to give me a little help with the way he structured his sentences."
"They won't buy it!"
"You would be amazed at what men under pressure will buy, Mr. Sable," said Jericho calmly. "They are dying like flies beyond this room and they don't even know who the enemy is. They will be easier to direct than you might think." He paused. "Did anyone besides Bland know that I killed Parnell Burnam?"
"His security chief—a man named Bromberg."
"Do you know his first name? Has he a military rank?"
Sable shrugged.
"Very well," said Jericho. "We'll just have to make do with Bromberg. In the pile of clothing were a number of pens and at least two notebooks, Mr. Sable. I want you to write down—precisely as Bland would express it—a message to the effect that he has captured the assassin and is tending to him personally, whatever that may imply. If he would be explicit, you must be. Then I want him to summon Bromberg to this room, and arrange for an armed squad to show up in about five minutes to escort you and your prisoner to his personal plane, which will fly us to Amaymon. I'm bound to get questions, so I want you to fill up a separate page with some rather terse remarks I can make to establish my authority and their inability to challenge or even question my commands."
"All right," said Sable, going off to a pile of clothes and emerging a moment later with pen and notebook. "But even if it does work, we're going to look awfully lonely when Bromberg shows up and doesn't see anyone else."
"There are hundreds of people in this room," said Jericho. "It'll take him a few seconds to figure out that only two of them are alive."
Sable wrote up the speech, and then Jericho switched on the radio, picked up the microphone, and began reading in Bland's high-pitched voice, matching the whining inflections so perfectly that he almost fooled Sable, who was watching him with both awe and a growing sense of alarm. It wasn't so much that Jericho seemed on the verge of accomplishing the impossible, but rather that he was accomplishing it so easily.
Bromberg knocked on one of the doors a moment later, and Sable let him in, immediately closing the door behind him. He was less than ten feet into the room when Jericho shot him down with the laser pistol.
"We've got to work fast!" Jericho told Sable, tossing his laser pistol and his knife across the room and starting to strip the Security Chief. Sable joined in and a moment later they had added the nude body to Bland's grisly collection. Then they buried all the clothing under a pile of bodies.
Jericho tossed Sable a set of handcuffs he had removed from Bromberg's pocket. "Put these on me," he instructed the detective. "It's got to look legitimate. Then unlock the doors, take the projectile gun out of my belt, and point it at me."
Sable did so, and held the pose no more than ten seconds before a squad of six men entered the room.
"Where is My Lord Bland?" demanded the leader, as Conrad Bland's legs swung gently to and fro not three feet from his head.
"Gone," said Sable with a shrug. "The crisis is over."
The man looked suspiciously about the room, then turned back to Sable.
"My Lord Bland mentioned extradition papers. May I see them?"
Sable turned them over to him. The man read them carefully, then returned them.
"All right," he said. "Follow me."
Jericho went along meekly, and Sable, still expecting the world to cave in around his head, fell into step behind him. They carefully threaded their way through the mounds of dead flesh in the corridor, then went outside and walked to an open vehicle parked between a number of burned-out cars and tanks.
They were driven through the still, dead streets of Tifereth, sirens screaming, for almost half an hour before reaching Bland's private airfield just north of the city. Then Sable, his gun still trained on Jericho, walked up a portable stairway into the luxuriously appointed cabin, fighting the urge to look back and see if the highway was filled with vehicles racing to stop the plane after the discovery of Bland's body.
But nothing happened, and a moment later the plane taxied to the end of the runway, gathered speed, took off toward the northwest, banked hard to the left, and headed south for Amaymon.
Sable looked out his window as they passed over Tifereth. From overhead it looked just like any other city, except for a marked absence of traffic. An observer would never know, he reflected, that the ultimate butcher had just been brought down by the ultimate executioner.