“A barn?” asked Cain as the warmth and humidity hit him full force.

She smiled. “I was rather hoping that you’d learned not to judge anything associated with Santiago by its appearance.”

She walked up to the prefabricated structure, tapped out a combination on the lock, and the door slowly opened inward.

“Come along, Mr. Cain,” she said, uttering a low command that illuminated the darkened building.

Cain followed her into the cool interior of the barn and found himself facing a row of drying bins, each filled to the brim with ears of mutated corn. High above him was a loft that had once contained hay but looked as if it hadn’t been used in the past twenty years.

“Well?” he said.

“Take a look in the third bin.”

He walked over and stared at it.

“It looks like corn,” he said.

“That’s what it’s supposed to look like,” she replied. “Look a little more closely.”

He reached in with both hands, tossing ears of corn aside, and came to a gold bar.

“The Epsilon Eridani raid?” he asked, laboriously lifting the bar with both hands and studying it.

She nodded. “We’ve got about forty of them left.”

“All in this bin?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the rest of it?” asked Cain. “I saw one bar with Jonathan Stem back on Port Étrange, but no one seems to know what became of the others.”

“Most of them have been dispersed,” she replied. “Would you like to know where?”

“Why not?” He shrugged.

“Follow me.”

Silent Annie walked into the barn’s tiny office, which contained two vidphones, a pinup calendar printed on real paper, a small wooden desk, an ancient swivel chair, and a computer. Everything except one phone and the computer was covered by a layer of dust.

She activated the computer, waited for it to identify her retina pattern and thumbprint, and then ordered it to bring up the details concerning the Epsilon Eridani gold.

Cain studied the readout as it appeared on the small screen.

“I see that Father William got about a third of it,” he noted.

“He’s one of the conduits Santiago uses to feed the hungry and medicate the sick. The bulk of the Epsilon Eridani gold was sold on the Kabalka Five black market.”

“Kabalka Five? That’s an alien world, isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t take aliens long to find out what men will do for gold,” she replied.

“What became of the money you got for the gold?”

She called up another chart on the screen.

“All of it went to hospitals?” he asked.

“Not quite. It also sponsored a raid on Pico Two.”

“What the hell is on Pico Two? It’s just a little dirtball of a world, out by the Quinellus cluster.”

“Some of our friends were incarcerated there.”

“So you got them out?”

She shook her head. “That was impossible.”

“Then what?”

“We blew up the jail.”