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family’s money out of the reach of litigation, we were able to make ourselves less attractive as a target. The reporter we replaced Leanda with, a Ms. Evelyn Garza, has no real financial assets, outside of her salary,” Thurman said. “She would have made a poor co-defendant.”
    His chair shifted again. “It was an effective strategy. Dyson Pharmaceuticals made a few preliminary legal inquiries, but they ultimately chose to forego formal action.”
    “Fair enough,” I said. “Last question… I couldn’t help but notice that you consistently refer to Leanda Forsyth in the past-tense. You think she’s dead, don’t you?”
    Thurman hesitated again. His chair stopped moving and he stared down at his hands. “Yes,” he said. “I am very much afraid that Leanda is dead.”
    “Do you have some specific reason for believing that?”
    He shook his head slowly, still not looking up. “My brain is a tuned instrument,” he said. “Both physically, and by training. I saturate my conscious mind with streams of seemingly random data and my subconscious goes to work assembling order from the chaos. A mag-lev train derails in Houston... A computer virus shuts down cargo-handling robots in Sri Lanka… A crop of synthetic wheat fails in Rhodesia… My mind digests these seemingly unrelated events, and predicts a palace revolution in one of the Middle Eastern emirates. I send a news crew to ground zero and—if my subconscious model of the facts is correct—the cameras are already rolling when the first shot is fired. If my gestalt turns out to be faulty, my crew comes home empty handed.”
    He glanced up at the shimmering array of wall-to-wall video. “That doesn’t happen very often.”
    He looked at me… really looked at me… for the first time. “Sometimes I can reconstruct the logic behind these leaps of intuition, and sometimes I can’t. In this case, I’m afraid I cannot. My subconscious appears to have concluded that Leanda is dead. Unfortunately, it has not seen fit to let me in on its reasoning.”
    He stared at me for a few seconds longer and then blinked several times rapidly. “Is that all, Mr. Stalin?”
    “For now,” I said. “Can I contact you again if I think of anything else?”
    “Certainly,” Thurman said, his voice suddenly crisp again. “I will leave word with my staff so that you won’t have to bluff your way in next time.”
    “I appreciate that,” I said.
    One corner of Thurman’s mouth went up a fraction, the closest thing to a smile that I had seen out of him. “For future reference Mr. Stalin, Vivien Forsyth does not own so much as a single share of TransNat Telemedia. Her husband is an elected official, and the Forsyth family goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m running a scam,” I said. “But I didn’t really expect my little ploy to fool you. It was designed to get me past your junior staff, and in that respect it did the trick.”
    “It did indeed,” Thurman said. “The old adage of the lion and the gazelle is not totally without merit.”
    “I don’t think I remember that one,” I said.
    Thurman swung his chair to the right and began searching the vid screens again. “The reference dates back to pre-warming, when animals still ran wild on the African veldts. It was said that each gazelle—in order to survive—had to be able to run faster than the fastest lion. On the other hand—in order to eat—a lion had only to run as fast as the slowest gazelle.”
    I grinned. “That’s it exactly. To get in here, I only had to be smarter than the dumbest person on your staff.”
    “Quite correct,” Thurman said. “But the principle extends to more dire matters than wheedling your way past my least-gifted employees. Leanda Forsyth was an intelligent woman, with excellent instincts and influential connections. If she is in fact dead, it seems likely that the person who