by David Weber
"All right," the President said. "We can sit here and argue over exactly what they meant all day, but I don't really think that's going to get us anywhere. I think we're all generally in agreement that this isn't precisely a forthcoming response to our last note to them?"
She looked around the conference table and saw nothing but agreement. Indeed, the secretaries who'd most strongly backed her against Giancola from the beginning seemed even angrier than the Secretary of State's supporters. She wondered how much of that was genuine exasperation with the Manties, and how much of it was frustration at seeing Giancola's predictions of the Star Kingdom's intransigence being borne out.
She made herself pause for a few seconds to acknowledge the danger of so much anger. Angry people didn't think clearly. They were vulnerable to the making of overly hasty decisions.
"On the other hand," she made herself say, "Tom and Denis are right to point out that there's at least a potential opening in their question about Trevor's Star. So I propose that we send them a reply specifically and definitively ceding sovereignty over that single system to them."
Several of Giancola's longest term supporters looked rebellious, but the Secretary of State himself nodded with every appearance of approval.
"What about their closing section?" LePic asked. "Should we take some notice of it and express our own desire to break this 'logjam' of theirs?"
"I'd advise against that, actually," Giancola said thoughtfully. LePic looked at him suspiciously, and the Secretary of State shrugged. "I don't know that it would be a bad idea, Denis; I'm just not sure it would be a good one. We've been to some lengths to establish our impatience with the way they've been fobbing us off for so long. If we send them a very brief note, possibly one which responds only to a single point from this one, " he tapped his own hardcopy of the Descroix note, "and does so in a way which makes it obvious that we're attempting to address their legitimate concerns—their legitimate concerns, Denis—but ignoring what Tony just called 'eyewash,' then we make it clear we're willing to be reasonable but not to retreat from our insistence that they negotiate seriously. In fact, the briefer the note, the more likely it is to make those points for us, particularly after how lengthy our previous notes have grown."
Pritchart regarded him with carefully concealed surprise. Much as she might distrust his ultimate ambitions, she couldn't fault his logic at the moment.
"I think it might be wiser to make at least some acknowledgment of their comments," LePic argued. "I don't see any harm in making an explicit connection between our assurances about Trevor's Star and their expressed desire to find some way to move forward."
"I understand your position, Denis," Giancola assured him. "You may well even be right. I just think we've used up so many millions of words talking to these people that it might be time to resort to a certain brutal brevity to make our point. Especially when the one we're making is our willingness to concede one of their demands. At the very least, the change of pace should be like letting a breath of fresh air into the negotiations."
"I think Arnold may have a point, Denis," Pritchart said. LePic looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.
"Maybe he does," the Attorney General conceded. "I suppose a part of it is how much time I spend wrestling with legal briefs and law codes. You don't want to risk any possibility of ambiguity in those, so you nail everything down in duplicate or triplicate."
"Very well, then," Pritchart said. "Let's see just how brief and concise—in a pleasant way, of course—we can be."
* * *
Arnold Giancola leaned back in the comfortable chair and gazed at the short, to the point message on his display. It was, indeed, brief and concise, and he felt a cold, unaccustomed tingle of something very like dread as he looked at it.
He'd made only one, very small change in it—deleted a single three-letter word—and for the first time, he felt a definite flicker of uncertainty. He'd known from the moment he'd set out to engineer Pritchart's foreign policy failure that this moment or one very like it would come, just as he'd always recognized the fire with which he was playing. But now the moment was here. By transmitting his version of this note to Grosclaude, he would finally and irretrievably commit himself. Despite the smallness of the change, this was no minor alteration, nothing anyone could possible explain away as a mere effort to clarify or emphasize. There would be no going back after it, and if the fact that he'd deliberately altered the President's language ever came out, his own political career would be over forever.
It was odd, he reflected, that he should come to this point . . . and that even now, he'd broken no laws. Perhaps there ought to be a law specifically requiring a secretary of state not to make any further adjustments to the agreed-upon language of a diplomatic note. Unfortunately, there wasn't. His quiet but detailed examination of the relevant law had made certain of that point. He'd broken at least a dozen State Department regulations dealing with the filing of true copies, but a good defense attorney could argue that they were only regulations, without statutory authority from Congress, and that as the Secretary of State, his own department's regulations were subject to his own revision. He'd need a sympathetic judge to make it stand up in court, but he happened to know where he could find one of those.
Not that technical questions of legality would make any significant difference to what would happen to him if his maneuver failed. Pritchart's fury would know no bounds, and his betrayal of his responsibility to her—and he was too self-honest to use any word besides 'betrayal,' even in the privacy of his own thoughts—would raise a firestorm of congressional support for her decision to fire him. Even those who would have agreed with his objectives would turn on him like starving wolves.
Yet even as he thought that, he knew he wasn't going to allow any doubts, any uncertainty, to deflect him. Not now. He'd come too far, risked too much. Besides, whatever Pritchart might think, it was obvious to him that the High Ridge Government would never agree to negotiate in good faith. He was in the process of educating the rest of the Cabinet to recognize that. In fact, he thought with grim amusement, he was actually educating Pritchart. But the truth hadn't gone fully home.
No. He needed one more lesson. One more Manticoran provocation. Hanriot, LePic, Gregory, and Theisman remained committed to the idea that somehow, some way, there had to be an accommodation which could be reached if only the Republic looked hard enough, waited long enough, possessed its soul in sufficient patience. The rest of the Cabinet was coming steadily around to Giancola's own position . . . and so, for that matter, was Eloise Pritchart, unless he missed his guess. But her present frustration was no substitute for the strength of will to look the Royal Manticoran Navy in the eye with the defiance that would make High Ridge recoil. She would still flinch if that happened, still fumble the chance to achieve her own goals. All he needed was one more push to generate the proper sense of crisis, reveal her weakness, and consolidate the Cabinet behind his solution to it.
He took one more look at the text of the note, inhaled deeply, and pressed the key authorizing its dispatch to Ambassador Grosclaude.
Chapter Forty-Eight
"Excuse me, Sir."
Sir Edward Janacek looked up with an expression of intense irritation. His personal yeoman stood in the open door of his office, and the First Lord's irate expression headed rapidly towards thunderous. The man had been with him long enough to know better than to physically intrude into his office unannounced, especially when he was grappling with something like the latest report from a lunatic like Harrington.
"What?" he barked harshly enough to make the yeoman flinch. But it wasn't enough to send him scurrying in retreat, and Janacek's brows knit in a cumulonimbus frown.
"I'm very sorry to intrude, Sir," the yeoman said quickly, "but . . . That is, you . . . I mean, you have a visitor, Sir!"
"What in God's name are you babbling about?" Janacek demanded furiously. There was no one on his schedule this afternoon until his meeting at four o'clock with Simon C
hakrabarti, and the yeoman knew it. He was the fumble-fingered idiot responsible for maintaining the First Lord's schedule!
"Sir," the yeoman said almost desperately, "Earl White Haven is here!"
Janacek's jaw dropped in disbelief as the yeoman vanished back out of the door like a Sphinxian chipmunk, darting into its burrow with a treecat in hot pursuit. The First Lord had just put his hands on his desk to shove himself up out of his chair when the office door opened again, and a tall, blue-eyed man in dress uniform, tunic ablaze with medal ribbons, stepped through it.
Janacek's dropped jaw closed with a beartrap-click, and the disbelief in his eyes turned into something much hotter as he took in the newcomer's appearance. White Haven had every right to appear at Admiralty House in uniform, and Janacek had no doubt at all that the sight of the four gold stars on the earl's collar and that glittering galaxy of ribbons explained his yeoman's failure to simply send the intruder about his business. Much as he wanted to, the First Lord really couldn't fault the man for that, and his jaw clenched even tighter as that same uniform's impact washed over him. It was a somewhat different emotion in his own case, because had they both been in uniform, his collar would have borne only three stars. And when last he'd been on active duty, it would have borne only two.
But that didn't matter in this office, he reminded himself, and instead of pushing himself fully to his feet, he dropped back into his chair. It was a deliberate refusal to give White Haven the courtesy of standing to greet him, and felt a stir of satisfaction as anger flickered in those ice-blue eyes.
"What do you want?" he half-snapped.
"Still wasting no courtesy on visitors, I see," White Haven observed.
"Visitors who want courtesy should know enough to go through my appointments yeoman," Janacek replied in that same, harsh voice.
"Who undoubtedly would have found all manner of reasons why you couldn't have squeezed in the time to meet with me."
"Maybe he would have," Janacek growled. "But if you think I would deliberately have refused to see you, maybe that should have suggested that you stay the hell away."
Hamish Alexander started to snap back, then made himself pause and draw a deep breath, instead. He wondered if Janacek even began to suspect what a childish, petulant appearance he presented. But it had always been that way where the two of them were concerned, so he could hardly pretend the First Lord's attitude was unexpected. And if he was going to be honest, Janacek had always brought out the very worst in him, as well. It was as if simply walking into the other man's presence was enough to transport them both back to a confrontation on a grammar school playground somewhere.
But at least White Haven was aware of that. That gave him a certain responsibility to at least try to act like an adult. And even though he felt deep in his bones that any sort of rational discussion of what brought him here was unlikely—to say the very least—it was also far too important for him to allow Janacek's temper to provoke his own.
"Look," he said after a moment in a reasonable tone, "we don't like each other. We never have, and we never will. I don't see any point in pretending otherwise, especially when there aren't any witnesses." He smiled thinly. "But I assure you, I wouldn't be here unless I thought it was sufficiently important to justify the sort of scene you and I usually seem to end up a part of whenever we meet."
"I'm sure a man of your well-known brilliance and intellect must have all sorts of things that need doing," and Janacek replied sarcastically. "What could possibly make me important enough for you to waste time in my office?"
Again, White Haven began a hot retort, only to bite it off.
"I do have any number of things I could be doing instead," he agreed. "None of them, however, are quite as important as the reason I'm here. If you'll give me ten minutes of your time without the two of us snarling at each other like a pair of playground bullies, perhaps we can deal with that particular concern and I can be on my way."
"I'm certainly in favor of anything which would produce that effect," Janacek snorted. He cocked back his chair, deliberately drawing attention to his failure to invite his "guest" to be seated. "What seems to be on your mind, My Lord?"
"Silesia," White Haven said shortly, eyes hard as Janacek kept him standing in front of his desk like some junior officer who'd been called on the carpet. The earl considered sitting down anyway and daring Janacek to respond, but instead he reminded himself yet again that one of them had to at least pretend to be an adult.
"Ah, yes, Silesia." Janacek smiled nastily. "Admiral Harrington's command."
His implication was crystal clear, and White Haven felt a fresh, white-hot spurt of anger. It was harder to strangle this one at birth, but he managed—barely—and simply stood there, cold eyes boring into the First Lord.
"Well," Janacek said finally, his tone irritable under the icy weight of the fabled Alexander glare, "what about Silesia?"
"I'm concerned about what the Republic may be up to out there," White Haven said flatly, and Janacek's face darkened in fury.
"And what, if I may ask, My Lord," he grated, "leads you to believe that the Republic is up to anything in Silesia?"
"Private correspondence," White Haven said briefly.
" 'Private correspondence' from Admiral Harrington, I presume." Janacek's eyes were hard as flint. "Correspondence divulging sensitive information to an officer who not only had no compelling security need to know but isn't even currently on active duty!"
"Security considerations don't come into it," White Haven retorted. "The information Duchess Harrington shared with me isn't classified and never has been. Even if it were, My Lord, I believe you would discover that all of my security clearances are still in effect. And that as a member of the Naval Affairs Committee of the House of Lords, I have a 'need to know' which transcends the normal uniformed structure of Her Majesty's Navy."
"Don't you split technical hairs with me, 'My Lord'!" Janacek glared.
"I'm not splitting hairs with you. Nor, as we're both well aware, does it really matter at this point whether or not the Duchess technically violated any security regulation. If you believe she did, the appropriate thing for you to do would be to file charges against her. I wouldn't recommend it, because you and I both know how that would end, but that decision is up to you. What matters right this instant, however, is what response you intend to make to her report."
"That's not your affair, My Lord," Janacek replied.
"You're in error," White Haven said flatly. "I realize you report to the Prime Minister, not directly to the Queen. But Her Majesty is also in possession of this information." Janacek's eyes went wide, and the earl continued in that same flat, almost robotic tone. "I'm here at her behest, as well as my own. If you doubt that, My Lord, I invite you to com Mount Royal Palace and ask her about it."
"How dare you?" Janacek rose at last, planting both knuckled fists on his desk and leaning over it. "How dare you attempt to blackmail me?!"
"Who said anything about blackmail?" White Haven demanded. "I simply informed you that the Queen also wishes to know what her Admiralty is prepared to do about the situation in Silesia."
"If she wants to know, there are proper channels through which she may inquire," Janacek snapped. "This isn't one of them!"
"Unfortunately," White Haven said icily, " 'proper channels' seem to be somewhat . . . constricted these days." He smiled again, his eyes cold. "Think of this as the Gordian knot and me as another Alexander, My Lord."
"Fuck you!" Janacek snarled. "Don't you dare come walking into my office and demand information from me! You may think you're God's gift to the fucking Navy, but to me you're just one more pissant admiral without a command!"
"I find myself singularly unimpressed by your view of me," White Haven replied contemptuously. "And I'm still waiting for an answer I can deliver to the Queen."
"Go to Hell," Janacek growled.
"Very well," White Haven said with deadly precision. "If that's your final word, I'll
go and deliver it to Her Majesty. Who will then, I feel certain, call a news conference in which she will inform the press of precisely how forthcoming her First Lord of Admiralty was." His smile was colder than ever. "Somehow, My Lord, I doubt the Prime Minister will thank you."
He turned away, striding towards the door, and Janacek felt a sudden stab of panic. It wasn't enough to overcome his fury, but it was sharp enough to penetrate it.
"Wait," he said flatly, and White Haven paused and turned back to face him. "You have no right at all to demand an accounting from me, and Her Majesty is fully aware of the constitutional channels through which she should request any accounting. If, however, you're truly prepared to spew such sensitive matters into the media, regardless of their potential effect on the military security and diplomatic posture of the Star Kingdom, I suppose I have no alternative but to tell you what you want to know."
"We may differ on just what would be affected if I spoke to the newsies," White Haven said coldly. "However, other than that, I find myself unusually in agreement with you, My Lord."
"What, specifically, do you want to know?" Janacek grated.
"Her Majesty," White Haven stressed, "would like to know the Admiralty's official reaction to Duchess Harrington's report of Havenite Naval activity in Silesia?"
"At the moment, the Admiralty's official reaction is that the Sidemore Station commander's report contains far too little detail for any definitive conclusions to be drawn."
"Excuse me?" White Haven's eyebrows rose.
"All that we—or Admiral Harrington—know," Janacek retorted, "is that a single Republican destroyer engaged—or was engaged by—an armed merchant auxiliary of the Silesian Navy commanded by a half-pay Manticoran officer who was dismissed his ship for cause forty T-years ago. That virtually the entire crew of the destroyer was massacred in the ensuing action. And that the captain of the armed auxiliary in question handed over fragmentary records which he claimed to have obtained from the wrecked destroyer's computers."