Oracle's Diplomacy

by A. Claire Everward

  His arm tightened around her, and she wondered how he could know, how he could read her so easily.

  “You hungry? I made dinner,” he said.

  “Not a bit.” She smiled. “You know, you can just have Rosie cook. She’s been doing that for me forever now. And she loves cooking.”

  “You know I like to do that sometimes. Rosie will still do most of it, I mean I do tend to be rather busy, but once in a while I’ll probably do some of our cooking myself.”

  Lara’s heart quickened. He was talking as if this was, as if they were . . . “Well, you do make great breakfasts,” she managed to say.

  He smiled.

  “She seems to let you get away with it, too. If it were me, well, she’s made it clear to me long ago that I may not cook in my own kitchen.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. But then, I’m useless there. And I keep being called in whenever I try to prepare anything anyway.”

  He laughed. “I spoke with Rosie myself. She’s quite happy to share the kitchen with me.”

  “I have a feeling she’ll let you do whatever you want. More than she does me, that’s for sure.”

  “That’s because she loves you and loves taking care of you. And she told me that I love you and that I love taking care of you.”

  Lara pulled back and looked at him.

  “I do love you, Lara,” he said.

  She began to speak, but before she could say anything he pulled her to him again and kissed her, not giving her a chance to answer, giving her time to accept. She contented herself with responding to his kiss in a way she could not yet do with words. Her head on his shoulder again, his arms tightly around her, she let her eyes close, let herself be with him.

  “Lara,” he said after a while, knowing this had to be done. “Your brother, Tom. He hid you well.”

  She raised her head and looked at him, not understanding.

  “I need to look deeper into Bourne, and I can’t touch him.” He updated her about Yahna and about his talk with Agawin, and explained what he was looking for.

  Lara let out a breath. “This is going to be fun.”

  It was Donovan’s turn to furrow his brow.

  “I didn’t . . . you see, I never told him about what happened. Any of it.”

  “You haven’t had a chance to talk to him,” he realized.

  “Well, yes. But also, I didn’t want him to worry or to know that Oracle could potentially be at risk. I mean, we checked on each other, like we always do, but by messages only, I haven’t actually spoken to him.” She took a deep breath. “He tried to call me earlier, but I didn’t have time to get back to him. Can’t call him now though. It’s late. What time is it? We’ll do it in the morning, we can catch him at home before—”

  Her phone rang with a pleasant classic, and the call was automatically transferred to the home system. “Oh, that can’t be good,” was the only thing she said before she accepted the call on the main living room media screen.

  The man who came on-screen was older than the one Donovan had seen in the photo on Lara’s fireplace mantel, who he now knew was Jason, but there was no mistaking that they were twins. His eyes, the same soft hazel as his sister’s but without the gold flecks, were somber. And angry.

  “It’s the middle of the night, why are you still awake? Are Milly and the kids okay?” Lara tried. Her brother was calling from his study.

  Tom Holsworth was not about to be pacified. “How do I find out about this now?”

  “Oh. You heard. I asked them not to tell you.”

  “You asked them . . . ! Well isn’t it a good thing then that Legal sent me today the report on your car and the insurance settlement over it?”

  “Damn, missed that one,” she mumbled.

  “Good thing you did. What the hell happened? And why am I only learning about it now? And just so you know, I had a talk with Frank. He called me after I called Legal to find out what happened, when I received the papers from them. At which time I was informed that my sister’s car blew up! With her damn near in it!” He never once raised his voice, but the sentiment was unmistakable.

  Lara let out a breath. “Donovan, this is my brother, Tom. Tom, this is Donovan Pierce.”

  Tom was not about to relent. “Pierce. Yes, the USFID agent. You’re involved in this. Frank says you saved her life.”

  Donovan nodded once.

  “Exactly how much did he tell you?” Lara asked, but Tom was too angry to answer her directly.

  “It seems, then, that I owe you a debt of gratitude,” he addressed Donovan. “Thank you for keeping my sister alive so that I can kill her myself!” He turned exasperated eyes back to Lara.

  “I love you too, big brother.”

  He pointed an admonishing finger at her. “You are not going to get out of it that easily! Why haven’t you told me yourself? And what if anything had happened? You want to explain this to mom and dad? To Milly and the kids? To Sarah? Jesus, Lara! You want to explain it to me? Exactly how many siblings do you think I have left? You joined Missions under the specific promise to us that you would not be in any danger! I will not lose you!”

  Donovan heard the fear in his voice and had to agree. He nodded again.

  “You got anything to say?” Tom turned on him.

  “Oh, I’m right there with you. The danger part. You’ll get no argument about that from me.”

  “Ah. See, I like you already.” Tom stopped abruptly and contemplated Donovan, as if just now fully realizing the man was there. “What are you doing there anyway?” His eyes narrowed, and he turned back to his sister. “Lara? What’s going on? Are you still in danger?”

  “No. Really, absolutely not. No danger. All safe. That was a one-time thing, Tom.”

  Tom looked at Donovan, then back at her. So what was the agent doing there in the middle of the night?

  “All right, moving on.” Lara squirmed.

  “No no, now I really want the whole story.”

  “Not now. Something’s going on, and Donovan needs your help.” She really wanted to divert his attention elsewhere. Like, now.

  “Donovan, not Agent Pierce?” Tom put the agent in the context of the information he’d been given, the actions this man had taken to protect Lara, and considered that he was there now. Days after the incident in question was over. In the middle of the night. He wondered if maybe there was something there. Could his sister finally be moving on, living again? He hoped so. He made a mental note to run a background check on the agent.

  Lara gave up, and motioned Donovan to please, please speak.

  “I don’t know what your home security and your clearance are,” Donovan said.

  “And you’re speaking from Lara’s home.”

  Donovan understood. “System security here has now been upgraded to top level. Status and safety.”

  “Of course it has.” Tom glared at Lara again, but she was purposefully avoiding looking at him. “Communications security is quite high here, too. Comes with the IDSD Legal affiliation. As for clearance, I don’t have Lara’s. Or yours, I imagine. But I have enough. Lara will stop you if you go beyond what I’m allowed to know.”

  Donovan nodded. “Okay. You hid Lara. I tried to find her.”

  “Yes, I know. The system alerted me too, not only IDSD. But Lara told me it was nothing.”

  This time Lara didn’t manage to avoid his glare. She sighed. Still, she was willing to face his anger now. It had been worth it, keeping the truth from him in real time. He would have worried, and as it was he was constantly afraid for her since Jason’s death.

  “I couldn’t find her,” Donovan continued. “There was nothing about her. I live next door and I still couldn’t find—”

  “You live next door?” Tom put several exclamation marks beside his mental note to run a check on this guy.

  Lara glared at him.

  “Fine. Later,” Tom said with an exasperated sigh. “IDSD does most of her hiding, but my firm and I are their peripher
al, civilian venue. Considering my connection to both IDSD and her, this creates quite an impenetrable envelope.”

  “Yes, even I couldn’t get through. And I can get through a lot.” Donovan hesitated. “First, I have to make sure that nothing you do, if you do, is traced back to you.”

  “Lara wouldn’t let you talk to me if she thought that could happen,” Tom said easily.

  Donovan turned to Lara. She nodded her agreement. “Okay,” he said, and came to the point. “A man travels to a certain location once in a while, always for a short duration, always to the same place. Never alone. Takes his wife, sometimes also his daughter. He claims he owns a vacation home there, and he does have a house there, in his name. Purportedly he inherited it from his grandparents, who retired there. The location is home to a certain little known . . . call them resistance group. There’s a mansion there that belongs to a man who is assumed to support and perhaps lead them. And others of this group might be living there, too. I need a connection.” He considered for a moment. “I also want to know if he got the house the way he claims he had.” He didn’t believe in coincidences.

  “Got it.” Tom was listening raptly.

  “This guy leads a clean life. He works, has a salary, savings he’d accumulated legitimately, some money he’s inherited, low-risk investments, normal expenses. And that vacation home, considering where it is it has to be an expensive piece of land but the house itself isn’t big, it’s pretty old, too, it wouldn’t have been that expensive at the time his grandparents purchased it. Doesn’t look like something it would be expensive to keep, either, and some related expenses do appear in his finances. He has no hidden bank accounts, nor aliases that I can find. Everything about him is transparent and pretty much ordinary.” Donovan paused. “Now let’s assume the guy and that group are connected. There has to be something changing hands there, could be they’re keeping money for him. Bank accounts, or even assets, maybe.”

  “That’s the connection you need.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are your limitations in obtaining this information yourself?”

  “That location the group and the house are in is supposedly neutral territory. It doesn’t allow the official representatives of any country to enter it for any reason, law enforcement included. In practice, it’s enjoying the group’s resources—which are more than enough to buy its loyalty—and will therefore provide no information about any of its people. In fact, it might go so far as to alert them if questions are asked. Also, if I look deeper into the guy myself and get caught, this would have serious implications for my investigation.”

  “What makes you so sure this is your guy?”

  “Two things. The first is information I can’t use, otherwise I might expose the person who gave it to me. The second is my gut feeling.”

  Tom nodded. This agent saved his sister. And she had obviously put her trust in him. Tom would go to any lengths to help him. “Where?”

  “The Federated States of Micronesia.”

  “No less.” Tom chuckled.

  “Gets worse.”

  “Can’t wait to hear.”

  “I need this as soon as possible. A man’s life is on the line, and that’s just a small part of it.”

  Tom scrutinized him, then turned to Lara. “How do you figure into this?”

  She didn’t answer. He shook his head. “Lara, what happened to you was . . .”

  She took a step toward the screen. “No, this isn’t anything like that. Tom, I’m behind the scenes here. It’s like it always was. I’m working from Missions, and no one outside it even knows I exist. I’m not part of this, not like that.”

  Tom shook his head again. It had been a shock to him, what he was told had happened to Lara. He worked hard to keep who his sister was hidden from the outside world, did his part to disguise the connection between Lara and Oracle. He never thought this could happen.

  “I won’t let anything happen to her.”

  The voice broke into Tom’s thoughts. Not the words, not just the words were what focused him, but the way they were said. His eyes met those of the man who spoke them. He nodded his belief, and his agreement. But once Donovan had given him the necessary additional details, warning him once again to be careful and to communicate anything he found only to him directly, and to stop searching if at any point he believed he might be exposed, he resumed his worrying hat one more time.

  “I’ll see what I can dig up,” he said. “And, Agent Pierce?” He was now back to being the big brother. “When this clears, you and I are going to meet. Have a chat.”

  “It’s a deal.” Donovan threw a glance at Lara. “I wouldn’t mind a chat either.”

  Lara let out a breath. Great. Micronesia sounded good right about now.

  The war room on the top floor of IDSD Missions’ imposing building deep inside the secure complex south of Washington, DC, was always organized and efficient, but these days it was also packed and intense. Operations oversight had been transferred here, while IDSD HQ Diplomacy in Brussels was still working hard to try to resolve the crisis vis-à-vis the countries involved, in an attempt to prevent an escalation that would be catastrophic for Europe and that was already threatening to take the alliance and the Internationals decades back.

  All workstations on the main floor were occupied, the teams for the Joint Europe Military Command and for Bosnia and Srpska, the Russian Federation, and the immediate surrounding geographical regions all at work and taking precedence, along with the team in constant contact with those painstakingly searching for the Ambassador. Alongside them, alliance coordination and global oversight teams kept their eye on events that might affect Internationals and their allies worldwide.

  Mission Command stood open, the officers who would be acting as mission coordinators if trouble arose working with their counterparts on site in Brčko District, on Croatia’s border with Srpska and Bosnia, on Srpska’s border with Montenegro, and watching all borders with the Russian Federation. On the wall-wide screen in Mission Command, satellite views of the region dominated, stern officers on the operations platform engaged in a hushed discussion before a view on the right showing the deployment of the Russian forces. The forces had stopped aggregating on the Brčko and Srpska borders, but the fact was that their numbers were still substantial. And so was the firepower they had brought with them. Fighter jets stood in nearby airports commandeered for the purpose, and armored vehicles stood in orderly batches along the borders, drones incessantly buzzing above.

  But the Russian forces were not the only ones there. Opposite them, on the Croatian side of Bosnia and Srpska, equally powerful forces headed by IDSD land and air units were being positioned to protect the alliance’s closest members to the west, north and south. Views on the left side of Mission Command’s screen showed combat drones scouring the skies, surveillance aircraft hovering high above them. At the alliance’s Split air-sea base fighter jets took off and landed, keeping a constant presence opposite Russian ones that teased the tense borders, and at Mons their peers stood in orderly rows, ground crews busy around them. They would be ready to assist any point in Europe, the disputed region a priority, if it came to that. And all the while the rhetoric from the eastern side was provoking, aggressive, blaming, while the western side was quiet, reassuring. Unwavering.

  The main problem was the area in between the would-be conquerors and the steadfast protectors. Both the Bosniaks and the Serbs were angry, feeling betrayed, scared—of each other, of the Russian Federation’s plans for them, of the future—a range of feelings, exacerbated by shattered hope, which needed only a spark to explode into a fire that would never again be controlled. News was scant, rumors spread, and people shut themselves in their homes in fear. Flags were pulled down, and decorations that had been bought when both sides thought a new future was near remained haphazardly thrown in garbage cans or rolling, forlorn, with the wind on the streets. That was not the future they had envisioned. And yet instead of uniting to protec
t the new life they had hoped for, the sense of betrayal, combined with distrust set so deep in both nations, overtook too many, and they were all but ready to turn on each other.

  And in the district of Brčko, near the tri-border with the two unsettled countries, the Internationals’ peacekeeping force still remained, refusing to leave. Originally stationed there with the agreement of the two nations and tasked with creating a safe zone in which the peace talks were conducted, now they themselves were besieged in the protected area they had created, under threat from the people they were there to help.

  With their eyes constantly on the disputed region, the Internationals’ High Council and the US administration cooperated and did their best to work with their peers in the alliance, some of whom were now eying them with unease, even suspicion. They were alone in the midst of a storm of confusion, blame and disbelief. So far, no matter what they did, the diplomatic efforts of both nations were unable to stop the escalation, not even slow it, and certainly not fix it.

  Something had to budge, soon.

  In Vice Admiral Scholes’s office, the wall screens showed views of the same satellite and drone feeds as in Mission Command, far smaller but zooming in whenever the vice admiral gave the mainframe the command. The views that dominated, though, were those of the feeds showing the Russian deployment and Brčko District. Night vision might have been inconvenient for some, but Scholes and his counterpart, who was watching the same images in his own office at the Pentagon, barely noticed it. The expressions on both men’s faces were somber as they watched the forces there to protect, and those there to destabilize.

  “It worked,” Scholes remarked. In the day since the news about Ambassador Sendor’s fate first began washing over the world like an angry tsunami, the Russians had been steadily moving their ground forces. But then, all at once, they had stopped and had since only organized their troops along the borders, no longer adding to them.

  In the Pentagon, Major General Scott Anderson nodded. “We’ve contacted the Russian president, as decided. Told him that Ambassador Sendor wasn’t among the dead, wasn’t even on the jet when it was found. As in, you know and we know that it wasn’t us who downed that jet, that it was you, and that the goal was to get rid of the ambassador who was standing in the way of your plans and frame the Internationals and United States for it in the process. We assume that this means the ambassador was supposed to be found dead on the jet along with everybody else. Except that he wasn’t. So either you are lying and you have him, or you didn’t know he wasn’t there.”