“Buwangwa, too, don’t forget.”

“Okay, so what’s your point?”

“I don’t like repetition. And the Guardians know we’ll catch them a whole lot easier if they stick to the same pattern.”

“I don’t see a pattern.”

“It’s not a pattern, exactly.”

“What then?”

“I’m not sure. They’re repeating their procedure. That’s not like them.”

Tarlo led the way out through the lobby’s revolving doors and used his e-butler to call a city taxi over. “The Guardians don’t have a lot of choice in this. Admittedly the number of dumb young Halgarths in the galaxy is pretty huge, but their living and social arrangements only have a finite number of permutations. It’s not the Guardians who are repeating, it’s the Halgarths.”

Renne frowned as the taxi pulled up in front of them; he was right, though that wasn’t the line she’d been thinking along. “Do you think the Halgarth security is running an entrapment operation? They could have hung Trisha out as bait?”

“No,” he said heatedly. “That’s wrong. If it was an entrapment they would have caught Liang the first night he met Trisha. His identity history data might have stood up to a review by Ridgeon Financial, but a specific entrapment operation run by the Halgarths…no way.”

“They must be running entrapment operations. If I were the senior Halgarths I’d be goddamn furious the family was constantly targeted by the Guardians.”

Tarlo settled back into the taxi’s leather seat. “They do tend to put a fair amount of pressure on the boss.”

“I don’t think that’s right, either. If they were running an entrapment they’d tell us.”

“Would they?”

“All right, maybe not,” she said, “but as this wasn’t an entrapment, it’s irrelevant anyway.”

“We don’t know it wasn’t an entrapment.”

“They didn’t catch Liang, and they haven’t told us, which they would do at this stage.”