"Actually, it was a pretty good scheme," I told him. "They knew they couldn't get one man in here with a theta bomb; they'd never get past the guards and the detectors.
"So they planted a couple of spheres of ditherium in two men—a negative sphere in one and a positive sphere in the other. All they had to do was stand close to each other, and the bomb would go off."
"What was it that tipped you off?" Ned asked.
"Several things. That phony note at the Hotel Granada, for instance. It was a plant to prove to me that there really was such a person as 'Zorvash Pedrik'—which there isn't, of course.
"In order to find the phony note, they had to give us a clue as to where it was. So they used a harmless neutrino generator, which would be spotted by our detectors.
"But a real assassin who actually knew that Holdreth Khain was working with us would have used something less harmless. Why an expensive neutrino generator, when some cheap radioactive would do? Because he didn't want to kill Holdreth Khain!
"And that meant that our friendly Damakoi was a phony."
Ned shook his head. "What a screwy idea. Get two men in instead of one."
"Exactly," I said.
"But if they maneuvered it so that one of the Damakoi could get himself in my good graces and get himself into the building—our detectors couldn't pick up just one sphere of ditherium, of course—and then put him in a position where the other half of the bomb would have to be brought to him as a logical part of the investigation—"