by O. J. Lowe
“Great,” Liam Caulker said. “Unbalanced. So far nobody has taken him up on it. His word means about as much as you’d expect it to.”
“Chief Caulker how do gauge the situation in Vazara at the moment regarding Mazoud,” Derenko asked. “Because as we’ve just been informed, they love Coppinger. Mazoud though, is someone who has always been tolerated, rather than loved as I understand it. Even when he was in charge of the Suns…”
“That about sums it up. Tolerated. He’s doing a job whipping up pro-Vazaran fervour, appealing to the national identity and a brave new future. Some are buying it but not everyone. Because that was the one thing you could say about Nwakili, he did have a lot of support. As damn close to unanimous as Vazaran politics has ever had. He didn’t have to shout a mass of nationalistic drivel to get his point across, he knew that sometimes you have to do the unpopular thing. Mazoud hasn’t had to do anything like that yet. My analysts tell me he’ll put it off until he absolutely can’t.”
“And the thing about making the unpopular decision,” Okocha said. “Sometimes it’s necessary. That’s Mazoud all over. A vanity project wrapped up in a self-absorbed package. He won’t do it until it’s too late.”
“We can’t let him carry on until he shoots himself in the foot,” Brendan said. “He could do untold damage until them. He’s a maniac in charge of a group of maniacs and it will spell the end of us all if we aren’t careful.”
“Unfortunately, we cannot deal with him until we’re further along on Coppinger. He has her backing,” Caulker said. “Analysis of the situation suggests she wouldn’t take kindly to it. There would be reprisals. We cannot ignore what sort of credible threat this might impose. Anything from trade sanctions…”
“Which might already be cut off,” Tobias Ojo cut in. “Mazoud has already said he doesn’t want to send anything out of the kingdom.”
“Good,” Okocha said dryly. “See how long that lasts him. Vazara doesn’t produce that much of its own food, or it didn’t. Killing the desert isn’t going to change that overnight.” He laughed out loud. “Hells, we were the sort of kingdom that’d export our gold to import our food. No wonder it went bad so quickly.” Another laugh and he turned to Caulker. “Liam, do you think Coppinger will hold him up if he fails?”
“Hard to say. Our most credible intelligence source on Claudia Coppinger was less than complimentary about her tolerance of failure. Based on what Agent Caldwell gave us, that would suggest she’d cut him loose if need be. On the other hand, you cannot run a kingdom like you would a business. Too much chopping and changing might destroy any goodwill she’s built up under the people if she backs a failing ruler and then removes him again and again. Some people can only be pushed so far.”
“I already have people in place in most major Vazaran cities fermenting anti-Coppinger dissent,” Parley Khan said, forming a triangle with the length of her fingers. “A slow process to be sure but it can’t be rushed. The Vazaran Suns have taken control of the security of the kingdom, both internal and external. Mandatory service periods as well. They’ve increased their numbers a dozen times over in the past few months. They don’t want any Senate influences in there. They certainly don’t want us. Any Unisco personnel found inside the kingdom will be treated as enemies of the state. Death penalty.”
Brendan made an unsettled sound, Arnholt stroked his chin thoughtfully. Something didn’t sit right about that. Not in conjunction with the look on his face. The ops chief looked troubled, pensive even.
“Then we leave Mazoud in place for the time being?” Tod Brumley asked. “Seems like it could be risky.”
“We do not have a termination order for him,” Arnholt said emphatically. “Unfortunately. He has not been added to the kill list, as distasteful as that might sound. The Senate wants to negotiate with him if they can.” He didn’t add that he thought it a waste of time, instead carried on with the facts as he had them. “There’s no hard evidence to suggest that he was involved in the displacement of Nwakili. Anything beyond circumstantial. We’ve all seen the footage of Domis Di Carmine terminating Nwakili.” He grimaced as he said the words. He thought he’d seen it all in his life. Yet there had been something about the savagely dispassionate way in which Domis had gone about the job. “He was placed in the position. It looks unfortunate for him, but the Senate is reluctant to sanction a hit on the head of one of our former kingdoms.”
“Is that what we are now then?” Tobias Ojo asked. He had a surprisingly high voice despite his stocky build. “Four kingdoms rather than five? We’ve been broken by this bitch?”
“It would appear so for the time being,” Arnholt said. “Can’t do anything about it. Reunification is something that the senate wishes to strive for. As long as Coppinger is alive and at large though, I can’t see it happening.”
“Our profiles of her says that it won’t,” Rosemary Dyer said. “We looked into her past, every speech she’s ever made, every business decision, every aspect of her personal life we have on file. Her father was one of the largest critics of the original unification. Her uncles fought in the Unifications Wars for Canterage. Both of them were killed in the battle of Sangar To. Just two more names on the remembrance wall.”
“If her family fought for Canterage in the Unification,” Brendan King said. “Then why is she doing this for Vazara? They were the enemy.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Dyer said. “She has a lot of empathy for the kingdom. If we had to guess at where she’s hiding, that is where she’d be. Used to go there a lot as a child and then more and more in her later life. Before Reims was seized, they put a lot of credits into the kingdom. How long she’s had this planned, we don’t know. But it looks like there was a lot of thought in it.”
“She knows the region, yeah?” Daniel Kearns spoke up. “You’re always strongest on your home turf, yeah? You know where you’re strongest, where you have the advantage in a fight, yeah? You go where you can reinforce, where you can build, where you can set a marker in the sand, yeah?” He had that tendency to add the question inflection to every statement he made, it was something that made Arnholt want to punch him in the face. On the other hand, Kearns wasn’t to be underestimated. He had a devious mind, he knew exactly what he was doing, and he was glad that he was on their side in this fight. “Vazara was pretty unregulated by five kingdom standards before, yeah? If I was going to do what she was going to do, Vazara is where I’d do it, yeah? She’s got the popularity, she’s got the resources, yeah? Put it together, she has a power base, yeah? I mean add in the fact they’re a pretty superstitious lot and that trick with growing the rainforest…”
“I want to talk about that in a few moments,” Brendan cut in. “Apologies, Daniel.”
Kearns glared at him before carrying on as if he hadn’t spoken. “It certainly looks like there’s an element of divinity in the whole thing, yeah? It’s a neat effect. I don’t know how she did it, I’ve spoken to several scientists who should be in the know and they can’t explain it either. They stopped just short of using the word miracle to describe it.”
“Miraculous is right,” Brendan said. “My sources say the same as those of Chief Kearns. No explanation. No sort of logic or reason as to how or why. It seems to have formed out of her whim. But I think Daniel has a point. The reasoning is sound. If I were to enable an operation undertaking what she has done, I wouldn’t have done much differently. That worries me. Not quite as much as another problem.” He cleared his throat. “This ban on Unisco agents has come at an awkward time. Following the emergence of this green phenomenon, I despatched a team to seek out the source of it all, for intelligence purposes. We need to know how it started and why. Recently I lost contact with them.”
“I see,” Arnholt said. “Did they find anything? Forward any findings to us before they vanished”
“Not to my knowledge?” Brendan said. “I would send another team after them but…” He let it hang. “However, I do have an alternate solution to the
problem.”
Why, Arnholt mused, did he feel he wasn’t going to like what the statement was going to be?
“In my other capacity as an expert on history and the distant past…” Brendan started to say with unflinching pride. Arnholt saw Baxter roll his eyes. He knew the feeling. “I was recently asked to join an expedition into the heart of this new Vazaran forest to examine their effect on some ancient temples. Due to the nature of my work here, I naturally declined at the time.”
“And you want to send someone along as part of the party to discover exactly what happened to your team?” Crumley asked sharply. “Are you aware of the possible repercussions of an act like that?”
Brendan said nothing for a moment. “I was not proposing to send someone along, Ms Crumley…” Arnholt saw Allison flinch a little at the condescension in his voice. Sometimes he got the impression Brendan wasn’t always the fastest on the uptake when it came to remember Crumley was on the same level as him now. “I was proposing to go along myself. Sending random Unisco agents would be an unacceptable risk and very few of them bear my knowledge in this field.”
It was Arnholt’s turn to say nothing. He didn’t want Brendan out of the office taking stupid risks. If the fool got killed in the line of duty by the Vazaran Suns, then it’d be a massive pain having to appoint a replacement for him. On the other hand, though…
“I’ll consider it,” he said. “Allison, what sort of effect is what Unisco doing having on the public moral? No danger of it shifting towards Coppinger and her group across the other four kingdoms is there?”
“Potentially,” Crumley said. “The longer any sort of conflict stalemates, the more attractive the underdog looks. Especially given the underdog has given us a bloody nose with Vazara. We lose another kingdom; the people will lose faith in us. Once they start to support the Coppinger cause as they have done in Vazara, her ranks will swell.”
“It’s true,” Okocha spoke up. “My department has been sifting through any sort of footage we can find of her and she’s started to refer to them as her believers, she regularly walks through throngs of them in Vazara, just appears out of nowhere, no prior warning and just vanishes after a brief appearance. We can’t lock her down, if we could…” He mimed the shooting of a blaster with his fingers. “It’s probably the only thing that’s going to resolve this conflict as swiftly as possible.”
“I don’t disagree with you there,” Khan said. “Removing Claudia Coppinger has to be as much of a priority as possible. Six months since they posted the bounty on her and nobody has even got close to her. If any of her inner circle tried to hit her, we’ve not heard about it.”
“In six months, we haven’t even gotten a hit on any of her lieutenants either,” Caulker added. “Rocastle hasn’t been seen in that time, we know all about Domis and how he was supposed to have been killed…”
That had been one of the few supposed victories out of the Carcaradis Island fiasco, Arnholt noted, that David Wilsin had claimed to have killed Domis in mortal combat. When there’d been evidence to prove otherwise, he’d been apparently incandescent with rage.
“And as for Wim Carson…” Caulker was one of the biggest vocal opponents of the Department of Mysteries and he wasn’t shy in letting his feelings be known about it. He shot Derenko and Baxter a glance. Baxter grinned sweetly at him.
“Wim Carson is likely holed up along with Coppinger and Rocastle and anyone else you’d care to think of in the Coppinger hierarchy,” Baxter said. “If you’ve been as of yet unlucky enough to find them, we’re having the same lack of luck in that department.”
“Can’t you divine them?” Ojo asked. There was more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “Or something like that? You’ve got powers. Use them.”
Baxter fixed him with a cool stare. “If it could be done, do you not think it would have been? It’s a big set of kingdoms. Sometimes you need to know where to start looking. So far, we’ve been able to ascertain one hundred percent where they aren’t. Which is a good start. I have Vedo crawling all known former Vedo refuges but so far it has yielded nothing.” He said the last part in a tone of voice that suggested he thought the act was a massive waste of time. He’d already stated as much, Derenko had mentioned it in inter-departmental reports. “Given the limited numbers we currently have, it’s a tremendous drain on our resources, but those are the orders.”
“Welcome to Unisco,” Swelph remarked. “Making do with what you’re given.”
Baxter said nothing, just stared at the man with his miscoloured eyes and smiled. “Of course,” he said. “And generosity is an underrated trait. We have no problem following orders, as has been shown many times already. How many lives have we saved? Can your bureaucracy put a number on that, Walter?” His voice took that tone on, the one which was almost impossible to ignore. It wasn’t loud, more intense, a deep sense of warning buried deep within it. It was like the threatening buzz of a hundred thousand bees, the menace a solemn implication.
“Nobody is understating the contribution of the Vedo to Unisco,” Arnholt quickly interjected before it turned nasty. Baxter was blessed with an abnormal amount of self-control but the last thing he wanted was Swelph to push something in that he’d regret. “It has been mutually beneficial for both groups to conjoin in this partnership. I’m sure they’ll get their man sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.”
Every department was allocated its share of funding. Some were larger than others, carried more manpower and therefore their budgets were larger than others. The Department of Mysteries as currently the newest and still the smallest department despite swelling its ranks in recent months, was bequeathed the lowest number. It really was a true test for Derenko. Yet the results had been encouraging so far. “It is an arrangement that I’m sure we can continue for a long period of time, beyond the extent of this current crisis.”
“That’s assuming any of us are around after the end of this crisis,” Carpenter, ever the optimist, remarked. “We might lose.”
“With talk like that, we will,” Tod Brumley said. “Director, Chiefs, we’re still doing well at the academy. We talk about how people are wanting to join the Coppinger movement, because they believe in Claudia Coppinger. Well we’re getting many more applicants now, people actively seeking us out.” It did used to be the other way around, Arnholt noted to himself. Unisco agents from the Recruitment department would seek out the most promising, candidates from the new spirit callers around the kingdoms and see if they could be spirited into the academy. “We’ve been all working around the day to vet applicants, we have many potential new agents all in the works. But it’s still not enough. For each one who makes the grade, there are a dozen who don’t.”
“Is that the fault of the instructors or the candidates?” Navarro interjected. “Sorry, Tod, but sometimes you can make a beautiful piece out of a shoddy material but not with a substandard tool.”
“Yes, and sometimes flawed material is flawed material,” Brumley said. “Don’t bandy metaphors with me, Navarro. I was doing this when you were still up to your elbows in engine oil.”
“That might have been but at least I remember what it’s like to be doing the job on the ground floor,” Navarro shot back. “You seem to forget what it’s like to be walking through that door. Part of the Unisco training is to prepare them for what’s out there…”
“And we don’t do that by coddling them! We’ve got a war on. We need them fighting fit.”
“Which they won’t do if they’re out the door because one of your heavy-handed instructors decided that…”
“Enough!”
His warning voice wasn’t anywhere near as potent as Baxter’s, but it had the same effect. Both Navarro and Brumley shut up at that as Arnholt looked around the table and sighed. “Okay, I think we made good progress today with these discussions. I want plans of action, people, I want three ways that your department is going to implement to try and win this damn war by the time we meet next.” In this time of cr
isis, he felt it was best to get them together twice a week minimum. Some of them had complained, however briefly but he’d made sure they’d understood his point of view in the end. “I don’t care how ridiculous they sound on the surface, if you can make a good argument for them, then we need new ideas. We need new strategies. We can’t afford to cede anymore ground to them. If they gain another foothold, they’ll climb even higher. Brendan, see me afterwards.” He banged his fist on the desk. “I’ll see you all in three days’ time. Dismissed!”
Eventually just he and Brendan remained in the room with the departure of Nick Roper, Vassily Derenko and Ruud Baxter bringing up the rear. Arnholt stretched his arms before moving to sit down across the table from his operations chief.
“So, you’re wanting to go to Vazara,” he said. “Where, I might remind you, Unisco agents specifically aren’t permitted to operate anymore?”
“We’ve all done stuff we’re not permitted to,” Brendan said. “You’ve sanctioned things that would make the Senate sit up and rub their eyes.”
“Yes, and it was the right thing to do at the time. This… This seems a little unnecessary.”
“Director, we won’t be going in as Unisco agents. We’ll be going in as archaeologists. I don’t want to abandon the fight here, but I think this is important.”
“Oh undoubtedly,” Arnholt said. “You thought it was important enough to send a team out there in the first place! What were you thinking?!”
“I was thinking we need intelligence on something that for all intents and purposes, coincided with the greatest threat to the five kingdoms making an announcement of divinity to a watching audience of billions of people. Given that seems to have authenticated her claim somewhat amongst some people, I think it’s important that we find out exactly what happened, so we can refute her claim. We’re not going to win this war unless we utilise every weapon we have, and the truth has always been the greatest weapon one side can bring to bear against another.”