Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  “Well, to be fair—which I damned well don’t want to be, you understand—it looks like he’s at least trying to be discreet. But it’s pretty clear he’s not completely buying her responses from McClintock.” Marinescu raised her eyebrows in a “tell me more” expression, and Haas shrugged. “The surveillance teams caught him contacting Christina McBryde.” Marinescu frowned, and he shrugged again. “That’s Zachariah McBryde’s mother,” he reminded her.

  “Oh. Right.” Marinescu nodded as the name slotted into position. It was an indication of just how harried she was that she’d needed Haas’ reminder, but the orderly mental files opened obediently once she’d made the connection, and she frowned. “What’s so significant about his contacting her? They’ve known each other for years. In fact, if I remember, weren’t he and his wife dinner guests at the McBrydes a few weeks ago?”

  “Almost right,” Haas agreed. “Actually, Dr. McBryde took his parents and the Charterises out to dinner about a week before we picked him up. But you’re right, they’ve known each other a long time, and of course he knows Dr. Charteris and Dr. McBryde worked together. There’s no sign they ever let their covers slip—Charteris and McBryde’s parents obviously still think the two of them worked for Kepagane and Bellini. But he does know they worked together, and he’s asking his parents what they know about this conference Charteris and McBryde are at.”

  “Damn it.”

  Marinescu’s expression could have soured all the milk in Mendel. It was good to know that someone as pablum-brained as Lisa Charteris had at least managed to maintain rudimentary security. Frankly, Marinescu wouldn’t have bet a half credit on her doing that, given some of her other decisions over the years. But if Jules Charteris still bought her cover story, then Marinescu had probably been doing her a disservice…in that regard, at least. Which didn’t make Jules Charteris’ curiosity bump any better.

  Kepagane & Bellini was a diversified scientific think tank and research organization which worked closely with the Mesa System government. It was so enormous a hundred researchers could easily disappear into its personnel files without a trace, and quite a few of the inner onion’s technical people had been hidden there. No flesh-and-blood individual at Kepagane & Bellini had ever seen or heard of any of those hidden people, however. The Alignment’s hackers had created an entire fictitious division over forty T-years ago, and it just quietly ticked away, establishing the bona fides of the individuals theoretically employed by it. It had a budget, an admittedly somewhat obscure niche on the corporate flowchart, and actually generated several terabytes of more or less useless information every year. It even had a really nice suite of offices in one of the more modest industrial towers on the fringes of Mendel.

  That, unfortunately, meant the revised Houdini plan would have to do something about that building. It would never do to have anyone’s investigators discover that none of the people who theoretically worked there had ever actually been there. And, by the same token, Kepagane & Bellini’s executive offices were scheduled to take a nasty hit. The nice thing about computer records was that even the most suspicious investigators tended to accept them as gospel unless something—or someone—else suggested there might be something…problematical about them. So it would be necessary to remove the human management personnel who had oversight over the department to which the Alignment’s fictitious division nominally belonged before anyone looking for disappearing genetic supermen asked them about it. Fortunately, they’d have to kill no more than another seven or eight hundred people—a thousand, at the outside, by Marinescu’s current estimate—to get anyone who could have raised red flags about the fictitious division. Of course, the executive offices in question were in Beadle Tower in downtown Miescher, and getting to them would take some doing…and a really big bomb. The total death toll would probably be closer to six or seven thousand, by the time the rubble stopped bouncing.

  “What kind of questions is he asking them?” she asked after a moment. “Are we going to have to tidy them up, too?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway.” Haas grimaced. “Whatever else, he seems to’ve bought the notion that there are real security issues here. He’s been really discreet in the way he’s phrased his questions. More of a ‘Have you heard from Zach?’ or ‘Boy, I wish Zach and Lisa weren’t still stuck out there on the island! Has Zach mentioned when they might be heading back?’ That kind of thing. And he hasn’t gone near Kepagane and Bellini’s corporate offices. Even he probably figures he’d get his wrist slapped—hard—if anyone noticed him doing something that stupid! I’d say he may be…concerned, and he’s obviously digging at it, but it’s pretty clear he’s not actively worried enough to risk breaking security over it. Yet, at least. So far, he’s been careful not to come right out and ask the McBrydes—or anyone else—just exactly what the meeting’s supposed to be about, for example. I’m inclined to think he won’t as long as he thinks he’s still actually talking to her. It’s what happens afterward that has me concerned. But like I say, so far he hasn’t asked the McBrydes anything that’s likely to start them looking for answers of their own.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway,” Marinescu growled. The fewer additional mandatory kills she had to add to her to-do list, the better. Arranging to get all of them into the proper kill zones was proving a royal pain in the ass from a logistics viewpoint. There were only so many of them to whom they could give direct orders, after all, and she and her team would be busy enough without figuring out how to eliminate whole additional families just because some idiot couldn’t keep from running his mouth! Not that they hadn’t already compiled a sizable list where that was clearly going to be necessary, anyway, including more than six hundred—so far—who’d have to be killed in individual assassinations because there simply wasn’t a plausible way to maneuver them into one of the mass-casualty events. And that didn’t even count the less important members of the inner onion who’d have to be eliminated because there wasn’t enough time or shipping to evacuate them.

  It was no wonder Haas was looking a little frazzled, she thought, but he was a good man. A steady subordinate who understood the realities. That was more than she could say for some of her team members. The fact that even more of the personnel originally earmarked to execute Houdini had been out-system and unavailable than she’d thought when Rufino Chernyshev dropped this mess into her lap meant she’d had to pull in entirely too many operatives who’d never been fully briefed on the realities of even the original Houdini plans. Some of them had been less than enthralled when they discovered what the new, revised Houdini entailed. In fact, she’d had to have five of them “retired with extreme prejudice,” as the really bad spy HDs liked to put it, for protesting their orders. And over a dozen more who hadn’t actively protested had been involuntarily loaded aboard ship and packed off to Darius under Gaul escort lest their obvious qualms endanger operational security, which had been a copper-plated bitch. What she’d really have preferred would have been to simply cull the lot of them and be done with it. Like she’d told Chernevsky, this whole bitched-up mess would have been an ideal filter for identifying and skimming off individuals who’d demonstrated they’d lack the necessary intestinal fortitude in the coming years. Unfortunately, she’d been overruled because some of the weaklings were deemed too important for removal. Like Lisa Charteris herself, for example.

  Marinescu snarled a silent mental curse. She’d known Charteris was going to be a problem. The mere fact that the woman had been stupid enough to actually marry someone she knew would never be brought fully inside the onion should have been a flare-lit tipoff. She should have been eased out of any responsible position and quietly eliminated in a nice, plausible traffic accident or accidental drowning T-years ago, because anyone of her seniority who was stupid enough to leave family to wonder what had happened to her if she had to disappear was clearly far too irresponsible to be trusted with anything important. And for damn sure she should never have been allowed i
nto a position which made it mandatory to pull her out instead of simply killing her. But had anyone consulted Marinescu about that? No, of course they hadn’t! And now it was her job—hers and her people’s—to take out the garbage.

  “Any idea what it is that’s bugging Charteris?” she asked after a moment.

  “Not really.” Haas twitched one shoulder in an irritated sort of way. “There’s no indication from the bugs in his apartment or his office—or on his uni-link, for that matter—that he has any suspicions about the CGI. And Donnie says her people have come up with all the right answers in his com calls…so far, at least. But if I had to guess, something just doesn’t sound quite ‘right’ to him. For God’s sake, Janice! The two of them were married for over half a T-century. Who knows what could’ve slipped past us and never made it into the data banks with that much shared history?”

  “We’d damned well better know, that’s who!” Marinescu snapped.

  Despite which, she had to admit he had a point.

  Donatella Primaticcio was her senior cyberneticist, in charge—among other things—of managing the communications interface for people like Jules Charteris when they tried to contact someone who’d already been shipped out. Every call was taken by a flesh-and-blood operative—always the same operative for each evacuated individual—from behind the mask of a computer-generated image of the person the caller thought she was talking to. Armed with complete dossiers on the people they were impersonating—files that detailed every moment of their lives, cross indexed the names of every person who knew them, however remotely, and incorporated the most brilliant matching algorithms available to match and identify names, places, and dates—the operatives were responsible for convincing the callers those people were right here on Mesa, doing exactly what they’d told everyone they were doing.

  For the most part, it wasn’t that difficult. Most of the callers already “knew” where the people they thought they were talking to were and what they were doing, and most of the conversations were brief enough—and sufficiently focused on relatively recent events—that they could be managed easily. Besides, most of the critical people on the Houdini list hadn’t been as fucking stupid as Lisa Charteris. The people trying to call them were acquaintances—casual lovers, at the worst—and it was simple enough to fob with them off with a “Gee, we’ve got to get together again as soon as this conference”—or workshop, sales trip, or whatever the hell excuse had been used in this particular case—“is over and I get back to Mendel.”

  But for someone like Charteris, with a goddamned fifty-T-year history with the person trying to reach her, there were entirely too many potential potholes. Not even the dossiers Alignment Security assembled could cover every detail of that many years together. And if Jules Charteris wasn’t really suspicious yet, if he only had a sort of vague itch he couldn’t quite figure out how to scratch, it was for damn sure he’d get suspicious as hell if his beloved wife never turned up again. Even if the Houdini team’s plan for covering her disappearance was perfect, someone like him was entirely too likely to start asking himself…inconvenient questions if investigators from someplace like, oh, Manticore, for example, started hunting for an Alignment whose ultimate goals were rather different from the ones he’d always thought the Alignment embraced. Worse, their questions were likely to get him to share his questions with them, and that could be one hell of a lot worse than simply inconvenient.

  “All right,” she sighed finally. “Put him on the list to be tidied up before we go and keep an eye on anyone else he talks to about it. I’m half inclined to go ahead and tidy up the daughters, too, just in case. But I guess we’d probably better pass on that, unless you turn up something concrete to suggest he’s shared whatever suspicions he might have with them.” She ran an irritated hand through her dark hair. “I think Chernevsky’s too frigging worried about ‘avoidable casualties,’ but whether we like it or not, he’s in Bardasano’s office now. And he’ll pitch three kinds of fit if we go ahead and pop them all without at least some fig leaf to justify it.”

  “Is he really monitoring the kill lists that closely?” Haas sounded skeptical, and Marinescu snorted.

  “Personally, I think the man’s an idiot—in his present position, at least—however good he may have been in the field. And to be honest, I’ve got my doubts about that field reputation of his, now that I’ve had the ineffable joy of working with him. But don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s stupid. I knew his brother Luka a lot better than I know him, but I can tell you Luka was nobody’s fool, and I’m not about to assume he’s any less sharp than Luka was. I think he should have one hell of a lot of more important things to do than keep looking over our shoulders and joggling our elbows, but if he’s decided that’s what he’s going to do, then he’s probably doing a thorough damned job of it.”

  “If you say so.” Haas still sounded less than convinced, but Marinescu didn’t worry about that. One thing about Kevin Haas, he understood following orders. “At least it shouldn’t be too complicated where Charteris is concerned. The simplest solution’s probably to have ‘Lisa’ invite him to join her at the Bateson conference in Saracen Tower. That’s the ‘Ballroom strike’ scheduled to erase her.”

  “Works for me,” Marinescu agreed. “After so long together, the least we can do is let both of them ‘die’ together, too.” She smiled thinly. “Speaking of Saracen, though, how does the execution queue for Final Flourish look?”

  “Pretty good, so far. It’s taking a little longer than we’d thought it would to get some of the assets in place, but none of the slippage is critical yet. Just as happy ‘the Ballroom’s’ not carrying out any active operations right this minute, though. We’re too short on manpower to do that and get everything for Final Flourish into position.”

  “Well, even the Ballroom needs a little while to reload between its murderous slaughters,” Marinescu pointed out cynically. “And after how busy they were last month, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it’s taking a little time for them to get their next wave of attacks organized. Besides, it gives more time for their manifesto and communiqués to sink in.”

  “Right.” Haas chuckled. “You know, I’ve actually enjoyed drafting those communiqués of theirs. They’re so delightfully…I don’t know…Over the top, I suppose. And the frigging newsies just eat them up!”

  “That’s what newsies do,” Marinescu said even more cynically. “One of the things I love about them. Feed them the right raw meat, and you can guarantee exactly what their headlines will be.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve fed them plenty of that,” Haas agreed.

  He was right, too, Marinescu reflected. The “Ballroom terrorists” had announced their fresh campaign of terror by sinking the passenger liner Magellan, the Voyages Unlimited Line’s deliberately archaic oceanic cruise ship. The Houdini teams had managed to kill the next best thing to three thousand passengers and crew people in their opening salvo and extract no fewer than seventy-three of their evacuees in the process, and not a reporter on Mesa had turned a single hair when the Audubon Ballroom claimed responsibility for the attack. Nor had they questioned the Ballroom’s responsibility for the shoot-down of the Knight Tours shuttle over Mendel. The Houdini teams had erased almost twenty of the names on their list in that one, and there’d been over a dozen more incidents in August. The total death toll—real and simulated—was well over seventy-five hundred, and the evidence that the murderous psychopaths who’d carried out the Green Pines Atrocity were back had rocked Mesan public opinion. The panic was coming along nicely, Marinescu thought, and there’d already been some really nasty incidents of obvious vengeance attacks against the seccy population. That was good. Haas’ “Ballroom” communiqués had picked up on them and added them to the justifications for their murderous attacks. Given how quickly they’d had to organize the entire thing, the revised Houdini was coming along nicely, but giving public opinion several weeks to…marinate properly would only make the crescendo of Fin
al Flourish even more effective.

  She was rather looking forward to her pièce de résistance, although she supposed someone like Chernyshev would get all teary-eyed thinking about it. She’d never understood that kind of flabby mindedness, but she didn’t have to understand it to take it into her calculations. And when it came down to it, the fact that so few people would have had the toughness to realize what was necessary and actually do it was the best long-term protection for Houdini’s secrecy. Most of the galaxy would have a hard time convincing itself that someone would kill as many people as Final Flourish was going to kill just to hide the disappearance of a far smaller number of other people. Even if something leaked, the most likely reaction would be to reject the entire idea as the product of some terminally paranoid conspiracy addict.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t afford to rely on that, which was why it was her job to make sure nothing did leak.

  “All right,” she said more briskly. “I’ll leave Mr. Charteris in your hands. And I’m glad to hear Final Flourish’s on schedule. Shoot me a fresh summary of where we are, though. I’d like to be able to go over it and clear any minor concerns with you before we close up shop today.” She grimaced. “I’m meeting with Collin and Chernyshev over supper. I don’t want to get caught with my pants down if one of them has any questions about where we are.”

  “Gotcha.” Haas nodded. “It’ll be in your in folder by four.”

  “Good. That’s good, Kevin,” Marinescu said, and gave him a broad smile of thanks. It was important to remind him how much she valued him.

  Good help was so hard to find, after all.

  Chapter Seventy