is
camera."
Sighing, Cade said, "Look, I don't want your camera and I don't want to
arrest anybody." Leaning close, he growled, "I just want to see the damned
pictures. It's been over half an hour since the blast, so I figure you've either
made a copy on a computer or you're selling the only copy, which would make you
one truly stupid fuck. Which is it?"
The knight stiffened briefly at that, but he realized that he could either
cooperate or spend his DragonCon weekend in a jail cell.
"Yeah. I made a copy on my laptop," he said. "In case the news guys ripped
us off."
"They won't," said Cade. "That's not how they work. You'll sell them a copy
and make me a copy on my laptop and nobody will go to jail. Good enough?"
"You won't try to sell your copy?"
Raising his right hand, Cade said, "I swear I won't sell them or put them up
for the public on the internet. Now decide -- and I mean right now -- whether
you're going to make me a copy or make me arrest you."
The woman asked, "Jeremy, how are you going to make another copy on his
computer? You have to have the camera software installed on the laptop."
"No sweat," said Cade. "I have a null cable. We'll hook the lappies up and
send the pics to my box."
And so it was. Cade accompanied Jeremy and his little group to the WNN
offices, who -- after seeing the camera's contents on the tiny flip-out screen
-- sent someone to buy a camera like Jeremy's in order to get the software
needed to transfer and remove the pictures from the camera.
The news honcho coughed up several thousand dollars when Jeremy swore there
were no other copies -- a lie he'd have told anyway to keep his own copies --
and the group returned to the hotel.
Half an hour later, Cade had a copy of all the pictures. He sat at the desk
in his fourth-floor room and studied each picture in turn as he cleaned his
Glock and replaced the rounds he'd fired, then he chose three of the best
pictures to print.
Cropping away everything but the woman's face, he printed the pictures as
full-page images and studied her some more over a cup of instant coffee.
Even as Cade had examined the smaller pictures on the laptop's screen, he'd
begun to feel certain that -- somewhere, at some time -- he'd either seen the
woman before or seen someone who could damned near be her twin.
Holding a full-page blowup of her face made things come together in his
mind. In 1