Miles in Love - Lois McMaster Bujold [441]
M'lord hissed through his teeth. "He was on my short list, yes. No wonder he was trying so hard to get off planet."
"He was up to his eyebrows in the plan, but he wasn't its originator. Do you remember how you said to me three weeks ago that while there had to be brains behind this operation, you'd swear they weren't in Vorbataille's head?"
"Yes," said m'lord. "I had him pegged for a front man, suborned for his connections. And his yacht, of course."
"You were right. We picked up his Jacksonian crime consultant about three hours ago."
"You have him!"
"We have him. He'll keep, now." Allegre gave m'lord a grim nod. "Although he had the wit to not bring attention to himself by trying to get off planet, one of my analysts, who came in last night to look over the new evidence that came in with the necklace, was able to run a back-trace and cross-connect, and so identify him. Well, actually he fingered three suspects, but fast-penta cleared two of them. The source for the toxin was a fellow by the name of Luca Tarpan."
M'lord mouthed the syllables; his face screwed up. "Damn. Are you sure? I've never heard of him."
"Quite sure. He appears to have ties with the Bharaputra syndicate on Jackson's Whole."
"Well . . . that would give him access to quite a lot of somewhat scrambled two-year-old information about me and Quinn, yes. Both me's, in fact. And it accounts for the superior forgery. But why such a heinous attack? It's almost more disturbing to think that some total stranger would—have we crossed paths before?"
Allegre shrugged. "It seems not. The preliminary interrogation suggests it was a purely professional ploy—although he clearly had no love left for you by the time you were about half done ripping open this case. Your talent for making interesting new enemies has evidently not deserted you. The plan was to create distracting chaos in your investigation just after the group made its getaway—Vorbataille was pre-selected to be thrown to us for a goat, it turns out—but we shut them down about eight days early. The necklace had only just been slipped into the delivery service's records and dispatched at that point."
M'lord's teeth set. "You've had Vorbataille in your hands for two days. And fast-penta didn't turn this up?"
Allegre grimaced. "I just reviewed the transcripts before I drove over here. It came very close to surfacing. But to get an answer, even—especially—under fast-penta, useful a truth drug as it is, you must first know enough to ask the question. My interrogators were concentrating on the Princess Olivia . It was Vorbataille's yacht that was used to insert the hijacking team, by the way."
"Knew it had to be," grunted m'lord.
"We'd have caught up with this necklace scheme in a few more days on our own, I think," said Allegre.
M'lord glanced at his chrono and said rather thickly, "You'd have caught up with it in about one more hour, actually. On your own."
Allegre tilted his head in frank acknowledgement. "Yes, unfortunately. Madame Vorsoisson"—he touched his brow in a considerably more formal gesture than the usual ImpSec salute—"on behalf of myself and my organization, I wish to offer you my most abject apologies. My Lord Auditor. Count. Countess." He looked up at Roic and Taura, sitting side by side on the sofa opposite. "Fortunately, ImpSec was not your last line of defense."
"Indeed," rumbled the Count, who had seated himself on a straight chair turned backwards, arms comfortably crossed over its back, listening intently but without comment till now. Countess Vorkosigan stood by his side; her hand touched his shoulder, and he caught it under his own thicker one.
Allegre said, "Illyan once told me that half the secret of House Vorkosigan's preeminence in Barrayaran history was the quality of the people it