“I will. You’re recorded and I’ll use that. Take real good care of yourself. Your ReseuneSec guard is going to get the news in about five minutes because I’m going to tell them, since I’m their Director. Are any of them with you in the room?”
“No,” he said.
“Good,” she said. “Just in case. If any of them leave the hotel, just let them leave. You’re not safe to investigate and don’t risk the status quo trying to stop anything of that sort. I already know enough answers that I can deal with anybody who’s going to go over to the other side. Just whatever you do, don’t go into the Defense Bureau to meet anybody. Meet whoever you meet outside, or at best over in Science, but I don’t like you traveling through the streets, and be very, very careful who you let through. Make them all come to you. Be a complete bastard.”
“That’s not hard,” he said. “Just you watch yourself, young lady. Trust the old wolf to watch his own back.”
“Love you, Yanni.”
“Love you, too,” he said, and thumbed the connection dead.
“Is it all right?” Frank asked anxiously.
He looked over at Frank, very sure the girl had been into his files, very sure Base One could do it; and she now knew something only he and the first Ari had known for well over a century. Frank was AF-997. Nearly an original, off the same genetic tree as her Florian, not at all far removed. And that wasn’t the number Frank had in every other record in Reseune. Damned sure it would be hard for anybody to get to Frank without knowing his real name, and that said something about how detailed young Ari had gotten about her research. He felt a little exposed, knowing she knew that secret.
But at least he wasn’t scheduled for a long semi-retirement out at Strassenberg, and she’d just made him an exception in the revision of Reseune authority.
Him, and Frank. When a whole lot else hadn’t been what it was supposed to be—he’d let something major get past him, and he was beyond upset, and embarrassed about the fact: he felt sick at his stomach, felt the years reel back and saw a dozen scenes replay, with a certain different knowledge about a certain azi. He stared out the window at the sandstone and concrete towers of Novgorod, at the gray mirror of the polluted harbor, and the barges that connected Novgorod to the upriver—so, so much that had grown up since the War. So much that had changed.
Kyle? Kyle was old history. Kyle had been there for nearly—God—he’d come on staff in ‘62 in the last century and lived twenty-four more years this side of the century mark, most of it with Giraud. Six decades. Six decades with Giraud, and then Hicks, leaking God knew what to whoever was running him.
Military agent. Giraud had kept him answering questions on military operations for a few years after his return from service in Defense. He remembered a supper meeting in ‘62, Giraud saying he was finally going to run the axe code, reclaim Kyle to active service.
Giraud had done that. He remembered Giraud saying it had gone pretty much as he expected, that Kyle hadn’t lost any memory or didn’t think he had. No conflicts. No problems. Just like the thirty-odd other alphas they’d recovered from Defense after the War ended…most of them specialists, technicals who didn’t mentally visit the here and now often enough to be a real problem to re-Contract. Some had died.
But Kyle. Kyle had been a psych operator, a military interrogator. Kyle had been on Admiral Azov’s staff, first.
Azov. Damn him. The bastard chiefly responsible for the mess on Gehenna. Azov had, later on, conspired with Jordan—had worked against Reseune, in those days. The first Ari had stung him, stung him badly. Azov and Ari hadn’t been friendly once certain things started coming to light, particularly the handling of azi in the armed forces, and Azov hadn’t lived to find out what else Ari had done to him, at Gehenna.
Meanwhile Gorodin had come, friendly to Science, supposedly a whole new post-War age in the relations of Science and Defense.
But Gorodin had never thrown the off-switch on Kyle or let Ari in on their nasty little secret. Secretary Lu, who’d served as Proxy Councillor for Gorodin, had never told them. Friend of theirs. Close friend of Giraud’s, most of the time.
And the military had still been collecting information hand over fist—learning everything that crossed Giraud’s desk.
They must have known the first Ari’s business, as much of it as she’d trusted Giraud with—which would easily be the whole psychogenesis project, most likely everything involving the feud with Jordan: and, oh, Defense had been able to snag Jordan, hadn’t they, just at the right time? Nice piece of psychology, that. Offer Jordan the out he wanted, the transfer to Fargone, right when the relationship had gotten desperate—and then when Ari’d gone for Justin—
That had been a delicious piece of news. And they’d used it. Defense had been all eager to talk to Jordan. If Ari had ever questioned Kyle herself, ever gotten into Giraud’s records, ever done that—oh, but Ari had been fully occupied with Jordan as the center of her problems in that last year of her life. She didn’t regard Giraud’s psych abilities all that highly, but she knew he was loyal and good at what he did.
And then she’d died.
And after Gorodin? If Kyle had still belonged to Defense and still been reporting to them, he’d been, oh, likely highly active during Khalid’s short term.
His inside information hadn’t saved Khalid from walking right into it with young Ari. Maybe Khalid had ignored the intelligence he’d gotten, hadn’t believed the kid was what she was. He’d found it out—in public, on national vid networks.
Darker thought, still, had Khalid ever really turned loose of Kyle once he’d begun to receive information from him?
Intelligence, for God’s sake. Khalid had been chief of Intelligence before he ever ran for the Council seat.
He’d been managing Kyle’s sort—oh, from way back. Possibly—
Possibly Kyle hadn’t ever reported to Gorodin at all. Maybe not even to Azov. They might not have known what Khalid’s source was, except that Khalid had good information. Azov had died of old age. Lu had. Then Gorodin. Defense had been nominally the ally of Science, most of the time, except the brief stint under Khalid. Jacques—Science had urged Jacques into office to succeed Khalid, when Gorodin had gone into rejuv failure; they’d managed to sway Spurlin…now assassinated.
Along with two people connected to the Eversnow project; them, and the Defense candidate who’d agreed to support it and who’d urged Jacques to vote for it.
Watch out, Ari said, for his own life, at present, in Novgorod.
Khalid. Chief of Intelligence, from the darkest years of the War, a young and ambitious officer in those days, not so old now, when most of that generation were dead. And it was entirely conceivable that his sudden rise in Defense had been precisely because of the quality of the information he had on the inner workings of Science.
“Kyle’s not ours,” Yanni said quietly to Frank, and turned from that gray, misty vista. “He never has been. Kyle’s still Defense. Did you ever see that coming?”
Frank looked at him, just stared in shock. “He never gave a hint. He’d honestly paired with Hicks. It felt that way. It always did, from way back.”
“Could that part be real, even if he was Defense?”
“Could be,” Frank said.
“It’s going to hit Hicks in the gut,” Yanni said. “He said Kyle was like a brother. Relied on him. Trusted him for years.”
“I can’t imagine,” Frank said. “It’s got to have torn Kyle up, too. He was different, around Hicks. He cared. Cared about the people in his command. That’s bad, if that’s true. That’s real bad.”
“Defense must have kept getting reports from him. He can’t have liked it.” A thought occurred to him. Giraud’s office. Hicks’. Access to files. Dossiers. A lot of things. Ari had died, and Giraud had taken the Directorship and increasingly turned ReseuneSec over to Hicks.
That was where Kyle had transferred over, and Kyle had attached to Hicks in a way he never quite had to Giraud. Hicks
relied on Kyle as a personal aide, in a way he’d never served with Giraud, who’d had Abban. Giraud had let Hicks handle Kyle, let him have Kyle’s Contract finally even finagled a provisional alpha certificate for Hicks explicitly to allow him to work with Kyle, because the pairing had seemed to work so well.
Ari’d died…and it wasn’t suicide. He’d never liked the suicide notion. Too much had been left unfinished.
If it hadn’t been Jordan, it had been Abban. Basic question of opportunity.
Giraud wouldn’t have ordered it. Without Giraud, Abban wouldn’t have done it—that part of the equation had never made sense to him. But it had never made sense, either, that Jordan had done it. Abban was the one with capability and opportunity.
Abban had been upset. Giraud had been upset. Upset had been contagious in the halls in those days after Ari had died. The whole universe had been in upheaval, and for several months after Ari had died, Giraud had been on a hair trigger and so had Abban. You didn’t question Giraud in those days. Secretaries had run scared and Denys himself had said, “Don’t talk to him. He doesn’t want to talk.”
In days when they’d had the vital job of getting the psychogenesis project going and they’d desperately needed to talk… Giraud hadn’t been outstandingly well-composed.
Settling into the new job, he’d thought. And mourning a woman he’d greatly regarded. Giraud had been loyal to Ari, he’d stake his life on that.
So Abban couldn’t have done it—could he?
But if Abban had done something that hurt Giraud—there was a little reason for upset in that household, wasn’t there? Abban’s own origins were in green barracks, never shipped out, never left Reseune: he had no questionable background. He’d been with Giraud from childhood. Giraud had changed offices; taken Abban with him into Admin; Hicks had already taken over Kyle.
Everything changed when Ari died. He saw it like a chessboard, all the pieces suddenly, massively, shifted on the board: white had castled-up, and young Ari had been a mote in a womb-tank for a whole, mostly peaceful nine months. Once that had happened, Giraud had settled—as if the universe was right again.
“What are you thinking?” Frank asked him finally.
“That Abban never could have killed Ari,” he said, “no more than Jordan could. Unless.”
“Unless,” Frank said.
“Unless he believed it was in Giraud’s interest.” he said. “Maybe somebody told him that. And then, in the aftermath, maybe he knew it wasn’t as true as he thought it was—at least in the immediate effects. Giraud’s upset would have been hard for him to take. A very, very upsetting thing.”
“He was an alpha,” Frank said. “He could put himself back together.”
“And he had a rationale. Giraud was walking wounded. But he’d protected Giraud from some unspecified danger. Now he had to take care of Giraud. So he did that, didn’t he? But nobody ever took care of Abban. Abban couldn’t tell Giraud what he’d done. And the week Giraud died he went into Denys’s care, and nobody ever took care of Abban.”
Frank looked upset. They’d known one another, Frank and Abban, worked together. They’d remarked, oh, more than once, how it was a damned lie that Denys was capable of handling Seely, let alone Abban, when Abban came over to him. They both knew about Denys’ alpha certificate, which was fake as they came. Abban had needed immediate help when Giraud died, and Denys—Denys had gotten notions in his head about staying in power and nobody touched Abban.
He’d sent Abban after Ari, and Abban was already messed up. “Killing the same woman twice,” he said to Frank, “and the first having been a mistake, that’s got to have rung clear to his deep sets. Nasty, nasty piece of business.”
“Nobody ever felt sorry for Abban,” Frank said. “But he wasn’t right, then. He really wasn’t right when he did that.” A moment later Frank said, “All those years with Denys—Seely wasn’t in that good shape, either.”
“More than that,” Yanni said, “if Giraud didn’t order Abban to kill Ari—Abban wouldn’t go out on his own. He had orders. And if they weren’t from Giraud, maybe they weren’t from Denys, either. That notion’s always bothered me. Denys wasn’t able to order that, not while Giraud was alive. That order came from somewhere else…a decision that Ari had been around long enough. Knowledge that she was already dying. That it would only shorten her life a year…and not let her finish arranging things herself. It would throw the decisions all to Giraud.”
“Kyle,” Frank said.
“Kyle, and the ones directing him,” Yanni said. “Defense. She’d yanked Jordan out of negotiations with them and brought him home, she was working just maybe too close to sensitive areas, on the verge of finding out just who’d been exacerbating Jordan’s discontent—setting him up, if you want my opinion, to land on the radical side of things. He’d been corresponding with the Paxers. With the Abolitionists, as it turned out, though I think it came as a shock to him when he found it out. And Ari took measures to be sure Justin didn’t go down his father’s route. I think she was on the track of something that could have become very uncomfortable for Kyle’s managers… I think they knew she was close to dealing with it. And Hicks went on meeting with Defense; and Kyle was right with him.”
“Kyle got his instructions there,” Frank said.
“Exactly. Tell me. Would you take instruction from another azi?”
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “I can say I wouldn’t, but if the keys were there…who could say he wouldn’t.”
“And Abban was Giraud’s,” Yanni said. “And Kyle was, at the time. Totally inside the walls. Damn, that’s a nasty scenario.”
“In a way, Ari caught it,” Frank said. “It took the next Ari to do it. Suppose there was something in the first Ari’s notes—suppose the first Ari put her onto it? Or did she figure it out?”
Yanni thought about it, thought about the way things had been going, and slowly shook his head. “I think if the first Ari had known, she’d have moved on Kyle faster than you could blink and she’d have had Giraud’s help doing it. I think our little Ari has come up with this one on her own. Damned clever of her. There’s only one thing wrong with her scenario.”
“That being?”
“She’s just told Defense she knows what their game is. She just stopped it.” Yanni looked toward the gray view again, the towers beside the sea, the towers that were Science, and Defense, Trade, and State. The other five—Citizens, Information, Industry, Internal Affairs and Finance—were just out of view. So was the tower that constituted the capitol itself, Cyteen’s Senate Building, and the tower that held the Council of Nine, the Senate, and if the dividing wall were folded back, the Council of Worlds.
He could call down the heavens. If he wanted to let havoc loose, he could gather all his evidence of assassination and espionage and take it to the Nine and lay it before the Council of Worlds—but Ari was right: it was getting dangerous. As things stood, it was a major risk for him just to take a car to the airport, and he wasn’t sure he’d survive to get there. It was a risk to go to Science, a risk for Jacques to come here. Damn the girl, she’d upset the whole government at a critical moment, maybe because it seemed to the kid like a good move—
Or maybe because she wasn’t the little girl any longer. She might be doing everything precisely to get a jump ahead of the opposition because she had reason to think there was diminishing time to do it. What had she said, that the explosion might have been a signal, to those who knew, that it was time to move?
Other things were moving, all right. And maybe he and Frank had just become two more pieces on the board, white bishop and white knight, say, out there to tempt the opponent into doing something. She’d tried to tell him get their asses home. He’d ignored her warning, confident in the moment he’d done it.
Maybe he should get himself and Frank to the airport, and go home, this evening, while they could, settle in and let the youngster run the place.
Or maybe the old bishop had a few moves
in him. He and Frank had been at this a long, long time, and he wasn’t out of resources yet.
Khalid? He wouldn’t concede the board to that bastard, not while he had room to maneuver.
“If we don’t get Jacques out of there,” Frank said, “his lifespan is limited.”
“Jacques is due at Science in two hours and I think we should go there now, just in case anybody’s timing our departure. If we’re in the target, let’s not make it too easy for them.”
BOOK THREE Section 5 Chapter x
JULY 26, 2424
1620H
The security hold was officially off. The halls were totally quiet, except for Patrick Emory on his way home from work. A ghostly hush prevailed throughout Alpha Wing. They met him, Justin and Grant did, on the gray, blue-wave carpet, and Patrick just looked nervous and tired after what had been, to anyone’s reckoning, a hell of a day.
“How’s Wing One?” Justin asked him, knowing Patrick would have come that way.
“Quiet.” Patrick said, “just normal. Except the construction hasn’t started back up.”
“Good,” Justin said, and they passed each other, on their individual business. They picked up Mark and Gerry downstairs. Mark and Gerry wanted to know when they left the Wing, and they played by the rules and didn’t make them have to scramble when exit security stalled them: Mark and Gerry met them at the lift, they were all pleasant to each other—
“Hope we didn’t mess up your supper,” Justin said.
“No, ser,” Gerry said, “we had a sandwich. Thanks for the warning.”
“Glad to oblige,” he said. “Sorry you have to tag us.”
“Our duty, ser,” Mark said, which it was.
They passed the exit desk, took the lift up to familiar territory: the two Ari had set to watch Jordan’s vicinity were on duty there—had a desk, today, for greater comfort, and disguised themselves as ordinary hall security. Mark and Gerry were going to have to stand, at least for a few moments.
“Our intent is to go out to supper,” Justin said to their two guards, “but that depends. We could send out; we could just eat in. Don’t worry about it. Just stay at ease.”
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