“I understand, Claire,” Ardmore said. “And they don’t care. They’re bitter-enders.”
“We should think about what it would take to snap them out of it,” Claire said. “Change their minds. There has to be a way.”
“Don’t hold your breath, Claire,” Diener said. “These people learned bitter opposition at their mother’s breast.”
“Oh my gosh,” Burke said. “That reminds me. His Lordship will be demanding lunch soon. We have to go.”
Thomas Pitney – also known as Jonas Whidley, Anthony Gilley, and half a dozen other aliases – was enjoying Sunday afternoon in the living room of his home in the Mondari Alps, on Biarritz in the Lacomia Sector. He didn’t know what Jody was making for supper, but it already smelled good. They were having company tonight, his in-laws.
Pitney was relaxing with a cigar and a cognac, looking out the window wall at the ski slopes on the valley wall opposite. Tiny figures shooshed down the slopes, weaving this way and that. He didn’t enjoy skiing himself, but he liked to watch. He found it relaxing.
The Mondari Alps wouldn’t have been his first choice, but Jody’s twin sister Jane was here, and her husband, Fred Davies, was a good sort. The two couples got along, so Jody had wanted to move close to her sister and Pitney had assented. It didn’t matter to him that much. He could work from anywhere.
As the very secretive head of the Throne’s private intelligence service, he could VR into the Department’s virtual offices from anywhere.
He could as easily VR into the Emperor’s office when summoned, as now. He set his drink down and selected the link in the summons.
“Your Majesty, “ Pitney said, bowing his head.
“Be seated, Mr. Pitney,” Ardmore said.
“Yes, Sire.”
Pitney was in the Imperial Palace VR channel 22, the Emperor’s office in the Imperial Palace on Center, over two thousand light-years away. He took his seat on one of the guest chairs in front of the Emperor’s desk.
“Mr. Pitney, we are identifying further agents of the plutocratic families of the former DP who are plotting against the Throne. We need to start tracking them down, because the odds are high that in the near future we will have to deal with them. One way or another.”
“I understand, Sire.”
“What I have is their aliases, Mr. Pitney. For most of them, that will be enough, as they are currently acting under those aliases and should be easy to find. Others may have additional aliases, and may be operating under a different alias I simply do not have. You will have to track them down.”
“I understand, Sire. What information do we have on that last group?”
“I have the headers for their communications using the alias I have. There is at least one message from each, and usually many more.”
“The full headers, Sire?”
“Yes, Mr. Pitney. The full headers. And this information will be updated daily to you by the Co-Consul.”
Pitney nodded, but his mind was racing. He knew from his time in the Imperial Police exactly how difficult it was to get a search warrant like that. Had, in fact, never gotten one. It took an Imperial Warrant, personally signed by the Emperor or Empress themselves, and they didn’t sign an Imperial Warrant because of what you wanted. They signed one because of what they wanted.
Ardmore pushed Pitney the file, and Pitney took a quick look through it. Yes, it was all here. The location data. Sector, province, planet, and coordinates at the time the message was sent, accurate to within inches. The problem was that he wouldn’t have the data until the next day after messages were sent, but they could probably make that work, at least for most cases.
“I understand, Sire.”
“And be careful you do not warn the people you are tracking down, Mr. Pitney. We do not wish to alarm our quarry.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“That is all, Mr. Pitney.”
Ardmore cut the channel.
“Ms. Schneider, Your Majesty,” said Edward Moody, the Throne’s Personal Secretary, as he waved Lina Schneider in from the outer office.
“Be seated, Ms. Schneider,” Ardmore said.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“Let me first ask you to update me on how things are going with the investigation, Ms. Schneider.”
“Nothing really new since I briefed you last week, Sire. We are watching traffic looking for new middlemen. We have a bunch of one-step middlemen identified, and the unlinked aliases they’re communicating with. Some of those are also acting as one step of a two-stage middleman setup, and we found those and the unlinked aliases they’re communicating with. We are also watching for two-stage middlemen, but we haven’t seen any so far. We suspect there are some, but we haven’t seen any yet.”
“And the software is in place to detect them, Ms. Schneider?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Very good, Ms. Schneider. Another question for you. Under the previous warrants, are we getting the full header information?”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Ms. Schneider, I need you to package up the data with the full header information for the middlemen and the aliases we’ve now linked and send it to me.”
“Yes, Sire. Every message, or just a typical one per person?”
“Every message, Ms. Schneider. I need that on what we have, and daily updates of the new header information.”
“Yes, Sire.”
Ardmore signed the document on his desk. He pushed Schneider a digital form of it in VR.
“I am issuing another Imperial Warrant to you, Ms. Schneider. This warrant authorizes you to collect the message contents themselves, for messages received or sent by the middlemen only. Operating under an alias is not illegal, but operating under an alias in coordination with people actively working against the Throne is. The mere presence of middlemen between the former DP’s plutocratic families and people operating under an alias is sufficient cause to collect and analyze the messages. Perhaps we can head off whatever they’re bound to be up to.”
“Yes, Sire. Thank you, Sire.”
“That will be all, Ms. Schneider. Keep me advised.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Investigations just gave me a new Imperial Warrant,” said Kana Miura, the head of the Imperial Network Operations Center.
“Oh, no. What’s this one?” asked her assistant, Marybeth Harris.
“They want message content as well.”
“Do they have any idea how big that is? Some of these are video conversations. Simulations.”
“Oh, I know,” Miura said. “They do, too. But it’s only a fraction of the contacts we’re tracking at the moment. And only their communications with specific individuals.”
“That could work, then. Sounds like they found their needle in the haystack.”
“Sounds like. Anyway, they sent me a list.”
Miura pushed the list to Harris, who looked it over in VR.
“OK, this doesn’t look too bad. I’ll get it started.”
Mustering
When Thomas Pitney dropped out of the VR audience with the Emperor, he checked the time. He still had some time before company arrived. He went back into VR and considered the data file the Emperor had given him. It was his own version of an investigative map, which was itself a version of the Imperial Navy’s battle-space simulator.
The data lay all around him in VR. It was unsorted blocks, as the original file was.
“Parse all entries as VR communications headers.”
The data blocks now all sorted into tables, with each field of the individual headers populated.
“Use origination planet field and destination planet field to generate list of planets referenced. Generate count of planet instances per planet, and provide sorted list.”
A long table of planet names appeared before him, with a counter on each that spun rapidly up as the simulator worked through the long list of data. The list then sorted itself in a flash. The whole thing had taken a couple of sec
onds. And what was at the top of the list?
Center, of course.
“Extract entries for which origination or destination planet field has value Center. Use latitude and longitude to show percentage of references within fifty miles of center of Imperial City.”
Ninety-eight percent. What he figured.
“Show unique user IDs with location on Center from this dataset.”
Several dozen. Well, Imperial City was always going to be the operational center of any plot against the Empire. He needed more assets in the capital.
He looked at the other high-runner planets. Mostly in the sector capitals of the former Democracy of Planets. Well, that made sense, too. But he had pretty good coverage there already.
Dickens would be good. He had caught the nanite murder of Paul Bowdoin on police radio, and immediately knew it was important. That’s how they were able to blow up the whole nanite murder ring. But Pitney didn’t need him on Phalia for this.
And then there was Victor Donleavy. He was in Voronezh on Odessa, capital of the Odessa Sector, going by the name of Barry Donnelly, office furniture salesman. That was an old Sintaran Empire sector, and Pitney didn’t need him there, either. But he sure could use the former Imp City PD undercover investigator in Imperial City right now. Travel time from Odessa wouldn’t be bad.
There were others.
Time to make some calls.
“Hi, Troy,” Pitney’s avatar said.
The avatar of Victor Donleavy – also known as Barry Donnelly, also known as Troy Donahue – nodded back. Pitney was using, as always in calls with Donleavy, his Anthony Gilley alias. It was a game they both played with each other, mostly to stay in practice. With other people, their use of aliases was deadly serious.
“Hi, Tony. Whatcha got?”
“I need assets on Center. In Imp City. I could really use you there. You got a problem with that?”
“No. I still have contacts there, but none that would be a problem. The last one of those suffered some kind of weird accident about ten years back. Terrible, just terrible.”
Pitney chuckled. He could well imagine. Causing trouble for Victor Donleavy could be a distinctly unhealthy hobby.
“Good. Go ahead and get started in that direction. I’ll get you some kind of transfer. Maybe another alias or something. There’s some big shit gonna go down, and it looks like that’s gonna be the center of it.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“All right, Troy. I just wanted to check first.”
“No problem, Tony. See ya.”
Pitney cut the channel. He was relieved Donleavy didn’t have a problem with an Imperial City assignment. He had been active there as a private contractor before Pitney hired him into the Department eight years ago, and sometimes there were dangling issues one left behind.
Donleavy was a tremendous resource for this assignment. He was something of a chameleon. He could look like anybody. Handsome or plain, charismatic or wallflower, intelligent or simple-minded. He could start a riot and then disappear into it. Be the life of the party or a guy nobody remembered being there. Whatever suited him and the mission. He wasn’t averse to wet work either, if it came to that.
And he was good at it.
Pitney considered other resources he could relocate to the center of the action. Interstellar travel times were an issue, but the good part is his furthest-flung assets were already where they needed to be, in the former DP.
Rasmussen, from Provence Sector. He was close and could be there quickly. Modesto, from Catalonia Sector. A few others.
He already had several people in Imperial City, of course, but he definitely didn’t want to come up short.
Pitney checked the time in Heidelberg, on Hesse in Baden Sector. Five in the morning on Monday.
He’d call Franz Becker after company left this evening.
Franz Becker – Chairman of Galactic Holdings, the majority heir of the Stauss-Becker fortune, and the wealthiest person in the Galactic Empire – was just starting his week when he got a meeting request from Jonas Whidley early Monday morning.
Becker knew Jonas Whidley was an alias for the person who ran the Department, the Throne’s private intelligence service. He didn’t know the real name of the person behind the alias, and he didn’t want to know. What he did know is that his family’s centuries-long service to the Throne had been renewed with the establishment of the Department, successor to the long-gone Section Six.
He was proud to serve.
“Good morning, Mr. Becker,” Thomas Pitney said.
“Good morning, Mr. Whidley. How may I assist you?”
“At the request of our friend, I have a need for a number of people to have job transfers to a new location.”
Whidley pushed the list to Becker, and Becker skimmed it over.
“This won’t be a problem at all, Mr. Whidley. Our companies can always use good people in Imperial City, and your people perform very well in their alias jobs. A competent lot, by and large. Do they need new aliases, or can we simply transfer them under their current names?”
“None of these people need new aliases, Mr. Becker. It’s probably better to transfer them under their current names. Makes their false identity deeper.”
“Very well, Mr. Whidley. Consider it done.”
“Thank you, Mr. Becker.”
By the time Barry Donnelly got into the office in Voronezh on Monday morning, his transfer orders had come in from the headquarters of Premium Interiors, the Galactic Holdings company for which he worked. He was being promoted and moved to their Imperial City offices.
The first passenger liner out in that general direction was later that day, but the faster route was on the IPS Emperor Augustus the Great, which wouldn’t swing through Odessa until Wednesday. The big ship was on a sector-capital route, and Odessa was its last stop before heading direct to Center.
That meant Donnelly was able to take his hastily named replacement around to his major clients on Monday and Tuesday and introduce him. He had made major inroads into some of the architectural and design firms in Voronezh, which moved more product into customer locations than selling direct to customers ever could. He was also able to introduce his replacement to the central procurement people at the planetary, provincial, and sector governments.
On Tuesday afternoon Donnelly returned to the office to find the secretaries and staff had arranged a little going-away party for him. There was a cake that said ‘Congratulations’ for his promotion, and punch, and everybody wished him well as they took their leave of him. He had been popular in the office, and a couple of the secretaries, in particular, would miss him.
None of them knew that, in addition to his duties for the firm, he had killed six people while on Voronezh, including Sector Governor Piotr Shubin, or that he had kidnapped and interrogated the Senior Vice President of Research for NanoHealth, the pharmaceuticals giant.
All on the orders of the Emperor, of course.
Troy Donahue also called Michael Odom, a friend from his old Imperial City days. Odom had helped out with the Scharansky kidnapping. It was the Sunday night Donahue got the assignment when he first called Odom.
“Odom.”
“Donnelly here.”
“Hey, how ya doin’? Long time and all that.”
“Hey, it’s only been a year,” Donahue said. “But you remember when you said, ‘When do we get to the bad guys?’”
“Yeah?”
“Well, looks like it’s gettin’ to be around that time. I’m shipping out Wednesday.”
“Where to?” Odom asked.
“Imperial City.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah,” Donahue said. “No shit. So I got a question for you. Can you spare maybe six months away?”
“For Imp City? With action going down? Sure. Ivan mostly runs the shop here now anyway.”
“Great. I’ll book you. First class on the Emperor Gus.”
“Nice,” Odom said. “I love travelin’
in style.”
“Oh. By the way. Bring all your toys.”
“But of course.”
Thomas Pitney saw in Donleavy’s report he was bringing Michael Odom to Imperial City with him. He checked on Odom’s background. Imperial Navy. Technical specialist. Private contractor since. Very low profile.
Nice. He could see why Donleavy wanted him, especially if things got really rough. From his study of Section Six’s history, poring over the hidden records he had found and unlocked in the Imperial archives, Pitney knew two-man teams had been some of the most successful in the unit’s history, especially the team of Paul Gulliver and Ann Turley.
He should probably see about recruiting Odom and making them a permanent team. Maybe when this was over. Donleavy was getting high enough up in management within Galactic Holdings, Odom could even act as Donleavy’s driver.
A driver was almost always invisible. Ignored. It meant they could go places and do things others perhaps could not.
Ambrose Dickens was packing up shop on Phalia as well. His would be a longer trip, almost a month, even on a direct spacing. He hoped he didn’t get there too late to be a part of whatever was going on.
Dickens was an intelligence specialist, particularly dealing with communications intelligence. He packed all of his equipment, much of which wasn’t strictly legal, at least for civilian use. He had collected it over the years, modified it to his use, added bells and whistles. It took up several trunks of his luggage and would cost a small fortune to take with him to Imperial City, but he couldn’t be productive without it.
He whistled, absent-mindedly and off-tune, as he packed. The message he got from the Department was characteristically brief, so he had no idea yet what was going on, but he had also been sent a large file of communication intercepts.
He would have plenty of time to decipher it while en route.
Once aboard the IPS Empress Julia, with his trunks delivered to his cabin, Ambrose Dickens unpacked one of the trunks enough to get his personal VR system out. He couldn’t do classified work on the ship’s VR system, so he had an Imperial Marines field system for his personal use.
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