Saul glared at him. ‘And that was reason enough to spy on me, too?’

‘The whole thing was a debacle, Saul. It was a five-year investigation with Shih Hsiu-Chuan as the prize, except you let him get away. At the very least, that makes an internal investigation near-as-damn inevitable. And once that investigation shows how you went into the field with a fair proportion of the narcotics coming out of the ice-pharms stuffed back up your nose, it’s going to be the easiest thing in the world to make you a scapegoat for everything that’s gone wrong. If you’re very, very lucky, you’ll only lose your job.’

‘And it’s not like you’ve had an exemplary record before, either,’ Sanders cut in. ‘At least, not after Galileo. You were nearly kicked out.’

‘I had a breakdown. That’s hardly a secret,’ Saul replied through gritted teeth. ‘I pulled myself together.’

‘Except you haven’t been promoted since,’ Donohue pointed out. ‘You’re still stuck doing the same kind of shitty undercover work, ten years on. However, what the peacekeeper task force found when they got to the ice-pharm raises other, more serious questions.’

Saul caught sight of his own reflection superimposed over the lifeless lunar landscape, and realized how scared he looked. ‘Like?’

‘Jacob Maks was killed by a single shot from a pykrete gun,’ said Sanders, his grin bright and feral. ‘We took prints from that pistol, Saul. Your prints. Your DNA.’

Saul licked suddenly dry lips. ‘It’s more complicated than you think it is.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Donohue. ‘Did you kill him, Saul?’

Saul felt a sudden flush of rage and waited until it passed. He fantasized about slamming Donohue’s head repeatedly against the floor, but he was so full of painkillers that his body felt like a sack of cotton hanging off his skeleton, leaving him far from capable of giving anyone a beating.

‘I had a gun to my head,’ he replied instead, his voice rasping. ‘They told me if I wanted to prove I really was who I said I was, I was going to have to kill him to prove it.’

‘You killed him to save yourself?’ asked Donohue.

‘No!’ Saul slammed the side of his wheelchair with one hand. ‘They were on to us. It was obvious Tanner wasn’t going to let either of us walk out alive. And Hsingyun . . . something about him bothered me from the moment I met him. He and Jacob acted like they were old friends, but I think Hsingyun had been on to him from the start.’

‘Go on,’ said Donohue.