The plane landed at MPV at 1933 hours local time. It had been the first flight available, and it had not been cheap. But Gabriel had liquidated the accounts in their names set up by the International Fleet, and transferred the money someplace more accessible, with several stops in between. He withdrew only $900 -- enough to pay for a pair of one-way tickets to Knapp airport and any incidentals. An additional seventy-five hundred he placed in a free checking account with a major international bank, for easy access. The rest left the country, using methods they'd been taught by Hale for minimizing the traceability of their money. It could be made available to them in its entirety with thirty minutes' notice.

Montpelier was as Gabe remembered it from the last time he'd flown in. They grabbed a cab, and Gabe gave the driver the address and some directions to his father's apartment, in Barre.

On the way, Gabe asked the driver to stop at a sporting goods store. The driver waited outside while Gabe and Sol went inside and bought themselves a pair of hunting knives. They were cheap, no frills. The knives needed only be sharp enough to kill a man. The rest was extraneous.

Sooner or later, they would need to procure firearms. For the time being, however, these would do.

The cab took them the rest of the way to his father's apartment building. This, too, was as Gabe remembered. After so much inconstancy during his training, so much variability, Earth seemed very static. Gabe wondered if this would be to his advantage.

The lift was empty, which was good; Gabe did not want any of the other tenants remembering them. Simon Reiner's apartment was on the second floor, apartment C. While Gabe kept watch, Sol picked the lock. No words needed to said. None had, in fact, not since earlier that morning. The silence did not bother Gabriel so much as the intensity in all things Sol did now. Even picking a lock was a task to be attacked. The lock was not manipulated. It was dissected. The mechanism did not open. It surrendered.

The door swung inward, and Sol's knife appeared in her hand, seemingly out of thin air. Gabe removed the sheath from his own, and followed her inside.

Nothing had changed. Not even the creaky floorboard. Sol stepped lightly, testing each step; the board only gave the slightest sigh before she adjusted her footing. Gabe, with a slow sweep of his hand, indicated the safest path. Sol led.

Master bedroom first. Empty. Personal effects still lying about. Clothes still on hangers and in drawers. But no Simon Reiner. The guest bedroom, as far as Gabe could tell, had remained untouched since Gabe's last visit, four years prior. The gift-wrapped box still lay on its side on the floor, bright colors faded by a layer of dust.

The smaller rooms, the bathrooms and closets, were checked, but neither expected to find him. Gabe had doubted they would find him here before they left Houston. But this was where their search would start. He had lived here -- recently, or so the pots and dishes around the sink suggested -- and that meant there would be clues. This was the start of the trail. Simon Reiner would be at the end.

Sol was in the office. Gabe stood in the little kitchen. The table that had been cramped into the tiny space the last time Gabe had been here was now folded up in one corner, in between the wall and the refrigerator. The contents of the sink held his attention presently. Several bowls, plates, and utensils stood in the drying rack to one side. In the sink itself lay one saucepan, filled to the brim with water but with what looked like cheese coating its sides. Beside that was a bowl, also covered in the cheese sauce, with a pair of missed macaroni noodles clinging to it, and a spoon laying over its edge. His father had not bothered to fill the bowl with water to keep the cheese from caking. He hadn't intended to come back.

Gabe was no expert on the effects of aging on synthetic cheese products, but he suspected that it was not more than a week old. Quite probably less than that.

When he moved into the office, Sol glanced up from her methodical search through the desk. She returned to work, but reached out a hand and turned a picture frame that stood upright on the desktop so that he could see its face. It was empty. And just the right size for the photograph Gabe had been shown at the police station.

That Gabe had seen retrieved from beneath Jubal Solenis' dresser.

Gabe walked around the desk, and noted what he was certain Sol had already seen: the metal trash can beside the desk was about one third filled with ash.

His father had known they were coming. Or that someone would be coming. Anything he thought might lead them to wherever he had gone, he had destroyed, by fire or some other means. Simon Reiner had been SOTF. A forensics team might find something he had missed, but Gabe gravely doubted that he or Sol would.

Gabe wondered what his father might have missed. It would have been easier, however, to guess what would lead them to his father if he'd known where the man had been going. Without that tidbit, it was difficult to decide where to start.

Instead, he tried to think of something his father couldn't destroy. Paper documents could be shredded and burned. Computer files could be deleted, and drives formatted. Recordings or videos, if any existed at all -- and Gabe doubted anything sensitive would have been permitted to be recorded -- could have been destroyed any number of ways. Quite frankly, just about anything here that might lead them to his father was destructible. Even the furniture or carpet, had they held any clues.

So if any leads existed, they would not be here at all.

"Phone records," Gabe said, aloud.

Sol glanced at him, and then at the ashes in the trash bin. Then she looked up. "The phone company will have them on file." She paused a moment, then turned to the computer terminal at Simon's desk. She did not sit. Gabe moved around the desk to stand beside her and watch over her shoulder. It had never annoyed her in the past; Gabe hoped that still applied. If not, she made no complaint.

Hacking was not the word for what Sol was doing. Her electronic commands were not an axe, but a scalpel. And Sol was equal parts surgeon and sociopath. The icy artistry of her probes and penetrations was close to unnerving.

Gabe had never seen this in her. And he knew the only cure was blood.

Simon Reiner's blood.

Safely out of Sol's field of vision, Gabe let his eyes fall shut. He knew already what he would do when the time came. He feared for her, for them. But he didn't believe there was any choice to be made. Things would be as they had to be.

Sol worked for close to two hours. It didn't take long for Gabe to move away from Sol; knowing what he would do, just standing near her seemed a lie. He studied the books on his father's shelves. Some of it was dissident literature, contemporary and historical, but not as much as Gabe might have suspected. Most was history and warfare.

It looked disturbingly similar to the contents of Jubal Solenis' bookshelves.

For the first time, Gabe allowed himself to wonder why. When he had seen the photograph, and remembered it as the one he'd seen so many times as a child, as the one from which he had recognized their shadows in Juneau, Gabe hadn't thought to wonder what Simon Reiner stood to gain from the murder of Jubal Solenis. His father was a cold-blooded monster; because it had not occurred to Gabe to doubt that his father could have done it, it also did not occur to him to question motive.

Now, however, it seemed so utterly random. What did Simon Reiner stand to gain? Who was Jubal Solenis? Nobody, as far as Gabe's father was concerned. Unless it had come up when his father had learned of his and Sol's arrests in Juneau, Gabe could not guess where his father would even have heard Jubal Solenis' name. As far as Gabe knew, the man had nothing that Simon Reiner could possibly want. He thought of Solenis' relationship with his daughter. Or at least, Gabe added mentally, nothing that Simon Reiner would gain through killing him.

And if gain was not the motive? Would Simon Reiner have killed Sol's father simply out of jealousy for what the man had? Did he so desperately crave a loving family that he would kill another man just because that man had one?

Gabe didn't believe that. This hadn't been jealously or rage. Passion had been distinctly absent from this crime. This was a clean, methodical hit. The assassin had come with a purpose, and had carried it out, and had left, closing and locking the door behind him.

It did not occur to Gabe to wonder if his father, personally, had been the assassin. Not when he saw the photograph, and not now. And it was the photograph that made him certain. If this had been a simple hit, whether Simon Reiner had been somehow involved or not, there was absolutely no reason for the assassin to leave the photograph.

Simon Reiner had murdered Jubal Solenis himself, of that Gabe was certain. He had signed his work.

"I have it," Sol said.

Gabe turned and moved back toward the desk, both his reverie and his unworthiness momentarily forgotten. On the terminal screen was a list of phone numbers, along with the dates and times the calls had been made, the duration of each, and the corresponding charge.

"These are only the long-distance calls," Sol explained.

"I'd bet that all his business calls were long-distance," he said.

Sol printed the list, and eased her way back out of the phone company's system.

"We'll need to find someplace to hole up while we work on these," Gabe said.

Sol picked up the hardcopy, and met Gabe's eyes. What Gabe saw there worried him, and not a little. "I want to talk to Bryant."

Gabe nodded, silently.

They arranged for the tickets over Simon Reiner's phone, and called another taxi. The knives they threw away; checking baggage and declaring their weapons were more trouble than the blades were worth. They would buy another pair when they reached their destination.

They paid for the tickets in cash when they reached MPV once again, and using payphones near their gate, they started on the list while they waited for the boarding call. Information was only allowed to give them the locations of area codes, but this was in itself useful. When they had the opportunity to access computer terminals, they could check the telephone listings for those areas and see which numbers were listed.

Those, in all likelihood, could be eliminated. It would be the unlisted numbers that would lead them someplace worth going.

On a list of 81 phone calls placed over the past six months, there were only 19 distinct telephone numbers. The area codes were mostly clustered around the NYC, LA, and Chicago areas. There were international calls as well -- London, Paris, Berlin, and Zürich. The most-called number, appearing 26 times, had a cellular-only area code. That, however, was not disheartening. The number would be registered to a name, and that name would have a billing address. It was a thread.

Now they only needed a place to lie low while they pulled at it, and watched what unraveled.