by David Weber
Of course, I can always order another of these, can’t I? he thought cheerfully, taking another bite of hot dog. Besides, the view’s nice enough for me play the tourist enjoying it without arousing too much suspicion.
He looked out across his picnic table at the sizable lake at the heart of Central Park in the city of Landing—Mobius edition. The table sat on a small spit of land that extended into the lake, wide open to any watching eye, and he felt a modest stir of admiration for whoever had picked the site. Not only did the hot dog stand near the picnic tables do a brisk business, which could cover any number of people’s “coincidental” meetings, but whoever had set the meet here—and for lunchtime—clearly understood that the best way to avoid bugs and directional microphones was to be so transparently open and aboveboard that no one pointed any of those objectionable devices one’s way. In fact—
“Is this place taken?” a voice asked, and he turned back from the lake to find himself facing a man of slightly more than average height with dark hair and improbably bright blue eyes. The newcomer carried a tray loaded with not one, but two hot dogs, plus French fries and a largish serving of coleslaw. When Harahap looked up at him, he twitched his head, indicating the picnic bench on the other side of the ex-gendarme’s table. “The other tables are packed,” he pointed out, with a fair degree of accuracy, then smiled. “Besides, this is my favorite table. Especially on a day like this one.”
“By all means, sit down!” Harahap invited. “And I can understand why you’d like the table. The view’s really nice, isn’t it?”
“And so is the breeze, when it gets as warm as it is today,” the other man agreed. He set his tray on the table and seated himself, then cocked his head slightly. “Forgive me for mentioning it, but that doesn’t sound like a Mobian accent.”
“Because it’s not.” It was Harahap’s turn to smile. “It’s Manticoran.” Which, he reflected, it really was. Maybe not Manticoran enough to fool a real Manty, but more than adequate to fool anyone else.
“A little far from home, aren’t you?”
“When you work for the Hauptman Cartel, you get used to being ‘a little far from home,’” Harahap replied wryly. “Still, it has its compensations. Like your system’s hot dogs. A fellow I met on my last visit here suggested I try them. In fact, he specifically suggested I order Number Forty-Six from the menu.” He met the other man’s eyes levelly. “He said I’d really like it, and he was right.”
“Really?” The other man smiled back at him. “Well, I’ve always liked Forty-Six, myself, but my real favorite is Number Thirty-One.”
“I’ll remember to try that,” Harahap said as his table companion completed the recognition phrase. “On the other hand, I may not be the one making the trip next time.” Something which could have been alarm flickered in the other’s eyes, but Harahap continued unhurriedly. “Mr. Hauptman has a lot of interests, and I’m probably being transferred to another area—my specialty is prospecting for new contacts, you understand—and someone else, someone with a good track record for developing contacts, will probably be assigned to service any Mobian accounts if things actually work out here.”
“I see.”
The other man took a bite of one of his own hot dogs and chewed appreciatively. Then he swallowed.
“I suppose it would be convenient for me to have a name in any reports you may pass on to your…replacement.”
“Oh, I think we’ll just call you…Mr. Brown. John Brown. How does that suit you?”
“I think it should work just fine, Mr.…Dabilenaren, was it?”
“Yes, Ardagai. Ardagai Dabilenaren,” Harahap extended his hand and “Mr. Brown” shook it firmly.
“Well, Mr. Dabilenaren,” he said, “the same friend who recommended this hot dog stand to you spoke very favorably about his previous meeting with you. I hope you understood, though, that he wasn’t in a position to enter into any binding agreements with your cartel?”
“Oh, of course! As I say, I’m a prospector. I’m used to situations like that. May I assume, however, that you’ve been authorized to make that sort of an agreement?”
“Let’s say I have the authority to enter into a tentative agreement, assuming it does turn out we can…do business with one another.” Brown took another bite of hot dog and chewed slowly while he let Harahap digest that, then swallowed. “Mind you, what your friend said to my friends sounded very promising. I think it could be a very profitable relationship for both of us, judging by what your friend said your own objectives were. But it isn’t the sort of final decision I’ve been authorized to make.”
“So exactly what sort of ‘tentative’ agreement do your friends have in mind?” Harahap asked, sitting back with his beer stein.
“Pretty much the one you discussed the last time you were here,” Brown said. “We’re definitely interested in establishing the sort of communication channels you proposed. That sort of market support could make or break our own marketing efforts here in Mobius. And we’re also interested in arranging to see some samples—hopefully a fair number of them—of the items you offered as a loss-leader to edge into the market. But I’m sure you’ll understand that we have to be a little leery of binding commitments until we’ve actually taken delivery of them and established both that your cartel can supply them and that there won’t be any…unpleasant surprises in the delivery chain. For either of us.”
His eyes met Harahap across the table, and Harahap nodded.
“Oh, I can certainly see that. So, having said that, let’s look at some nuts and bolts here. First, about those communication channels. The best way to—”
* * *
“—so I don’t think you’ll have any problems, assuming the weapons drop goes smoothly,” Harahap said into the microphone, dictating the final paragraphs of his report as Факел departed Mobius orbit, headed for the system hyper limit and Wonder. That report would be dropped off in a public mailbox for the next Alignment contact to pick up when he arrived in-system. “Landrum’s position with Somerton should make the actual drop fairly straightforward, unless these people’s security is a lot more porous than I think it is. I’ve only promised them small arms and a few crew-served anti-armor weapons in the first drop, so bulk shouldn’t be an enormous problem. I’d really like to get something heavier into their hands, but I think starting out fairly small will be more convincing—or reassuring, at least—to the locals.”
He sipped whiskey for a moment, thinking about that, then nodded to himself and resumed.
“This visit’s strengthened my impression that these people are a lot better organized than three-quarters of the would-be ‘revolutionaries’ out this way. I suspect ‘Mister Brown’ is considerably higher in their hierarchy than he wanted to admit, but he’s also very smooth. I’d say he has strong nerves, and if he’s as senior in their organization as I think he is, they strike me as very serious players.
“I’ve given him the ‘contact codes’ to request naval support from the ‘Manties,’ and we may need to be ready for things to pop here in Mobius sooner than we’d anticipated. Lombroso’s decision to hold ‘open elections’ seems to’ve struck a much deeper nerve than he or his advisors thought it would. There’s enough frustration that genuine political debate’s beginning to creep into Mobians’ day-to-day conversations, now that they’re going to be allowed to actually vote, and that’s never a good sign for a regime like his. I’d say the odds are at least seventy-thirty that he’ll try to ratchet it back down once he realizes what he’s started, and that’s when the shit will really hit the fan. So our window to get these people primed may be narrower than we’d thought. Bearing that in mind, I recommend—”
* * *
“Mr. Nyhus is here for his thirteen-hundred, Sir,” Marianne Haavikko announced over Adão Ukhtomskoy’s com.
“Oh, wonderful,” Ukhtomskoy replied. Marianne had been with him for almost two and a half T-decades; there wasn’t much point in trying to hide his opinion of Rajmun
d Nyhus from her. She was also the complete mistress of her expression, and no one else—like Rajmund Nyhus—was going to hear him over her earbug.
“Well, I suppose there’s no escape. Send him in.”
“Of course, Sir,” Haavikko said pleasantly, and Ukhtomskoy sat back in his chair.
The office door opened a moment later to admit a well-tailored man with very fair hair, a dark complexion, and blue eyes. He was rather shorter than Ukhtomskoy’s hundred and eighty centimeters, but he had the look of someone who spent a lot of time working out.
“Rajmund!” Ukhtomskoy said, standing and holding out his hand with a very fair counterfeit of enthusiasm.
“Adão.” Nyhus gripped the extended hand firmly. “Thanks for working me in on such short notice.”
“You’re the head of Section Two,” Ukhtomskoy pointed out. “I’m in the habit of ‘working in’ my section heads when they say they need to see me.” He smiled thinly, waving Nyhus into one of the chairs facing his desk before he sat back down himself. “Which isn’t to say,” he continued, “that I don’t find myself wondering what’s come up so suddenly.”
“I know.” Nyhus shrugged. “I hadn’t seen the reports before our regular first-of-the-week meeting, though. Once I did, and once I had a chance to think about the analysis, I decided it probably shouldn’t wait until Thursday, though.”
“What sort of reports?” Ukhtomskoy frowned.
“There’s something going on in the Verge—something new, I mean,” Nyhus amplified. “There’s a lot of unrest kicking up in our administered systems. And in some systems where we’re only present in a support capacity, as well.”
“Pardon me, but don’t we always have a lot of ‘unrest’ in those systems?” Ukhtomskoy asked a bit tartly.
“I probably should’ve said additional unrest,” Nyhus replied. “It’s getting more organized, and we’ve got indications someone on the outside may be fanning the flames.”
“Fanning them exactly how?”
“So far it’s still largely straws in the wind,” Nyhus admitted, “but there are rumors in some of our pipelines about promises of weapons—substantial numbers of weapons. And there are even some suggestions that someone’s promising outside naval support.”
Ukhtomskoy’s eyes narrowed. This was the first he’d heard about anything like that from any OFS source, but there was that memo Noritoshi Väinöla had kicked over to him from the Gendarmerie a month or so ago. He’d written it off at the time as alarmism, some analyst with too much time on his hands seeing a pattern in what was actually chaos. But if Section Two was picking up some sort of confirming evidence, maybe this meeting with Nyhus wasn’t going to be the usual complete waste of time.
“What kind of ‘rumors’ are we talking about here, Rajmund?” he asked a bit sharply, and Nyhus raised his right hand, palm up.
“You know how it is, Adão. We’ve got confidential informants scattered from here to hell and back, and every one of them wants to find something to convince us we ought to be paying him more. So I was a little…skeptical, let’s say, when the first reports came in.
“Obviously, no one’s going to be able to document anything like this, and I think some of my senior system agents are redacting the names of their informants.” His mouth twisted briefly. “We’ve had too many of them burned because of sloppy information security along the chain to the home office, so it’s not too hard to understand why they’re reluctant to scatter names around. I’ve sent clarification requests back down the line, but it’s going to take quite a while for them to get back to me.”
Ukhtomskoy nodded impatiently. The lengthy delays in transmitting data over interstellar distances were any intelligence service’s worst bottleneck.
“What concerns me is how broad a front these rumors and hints are coming in across,” Nyhus continued. “It stretches—assuming there’s anything to it—all the way from the Talbott Quadrant to the Maya Sector. In fact, it seems to extend even beyond Maya. And the other thing that concerns me is the name that seems to be associated with the promises of support.”
He paused, and Ukhtomskoy scowled. One of the many things he disliked about Nyhus was his childish tendency to draw out revelations. Ukhtomskoy hadn’t played “I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you’ll-show-me-yours” since high school.
Willingly, at any rate.
“And what name would that be?” he asked irritably.
“Manticore,” Nyhus replied.
* * *
“I think the hook’s set,” Rajmund Nyhus said later that evening.
He sat in a restaurant privacy booth, looking across the table at a very attractive platinum-haired woman who was dressed just a bit too cheaply and gaudily for her present surroundings. As part of his persona as a corruptible bureaucrat deeply in bed with every transstellar in the galaxy, he’d cultivated a public taste for cheap prostitutes willing to put up with fairly…stringent requirements. The fact that he actually enjoyed their services was an added cherry on top, but the real reason was to add texture to his corrupt, none-to-bright, rather seedy cover. Well, that and specifically to cover his meetings with his current “date.”
Like him, Claire McGrath was a beta-line of the Mesan Alignment.
Technically, Claire was his “handler,” but the truth was that Rajmund Nyhus was a lot smarter than most of his Frontier Security colleagues would have believed. He was also too valuable and too highly placed for anything but the most secure communication avenues, however, and Claire was exactly that. Among the other traits built into her line’s genotype were photographic memory and the ability to almost perfectly mimic the exact tone and emphasis of anything one of “her” agents said to her. Nothing went out electronically or in hard copy; she carried every bit of it in her head, and the recipients of her reports could be confident she’d delivered them with every nuance of the agents who’d given them to her in the first place.
Best of all, from Nyhus’ viewpoint, her line’s designers had also included quite a bit of DNA from one of Manpower’s more popular pleasure slave lines. In addition to a stunning figure, she had the hyper-driven libido that was genegineered into them, and without the all too often brutal “training” Manpower’s slaves had to survive, she embraced that libido enthusiastically. She even enjoyed playing the roles Nyhus most enjoyed. He was looking forward to this evening’s romp in his playroom, and both of them could claim with straight faces that all of the interesting noises she was going to make were a legitimate part of his cover. After all, it was a given that his apartment was thoroughly bugged by Frontier Security’s own internal security agencies. It would never do to not live up to his cover, now would it?
In the meantime, though, the restaurant booth was clear of OFS’ bugs. He knew it was, because it, too, belonged to an Alignment employee, although in this case, all he knew about the Alignment was that someone—he thought it was the local underworld—supplemented his official cash flow generously for operating his own restaurant. He made a comfortable profit out of the restaurant, as well, and all his clandestine benefactor required was that he make sure it was swept regularly and rigorously for spy devices expressly so that people like Nyhus could meet people like Claire in a very public but totally secure location.
And the fact that so many other people knew how secure it was covered the meetings of actual Alignment operatives. They simply disappeared into the background of everyone else using it for exactly the same purposes…which also helped explain why it showed such a comfortable profit.
“You think Ukhtomskoy’s going to take it all the way up to MacArtney?” Claire asked now while the toes of one bare foot stroked his shin under the table.
“I doubt it. There’s not enough urgency in anything I’ve fed him so far to push it that far up the queue this quickly. But I expect he will be bringing it up at his next conference with Väinöla and Mabley. Mind you, there are so many rumors flying around about Manticore this and Manticore that I doubt anybody—including Ukhtomskoy
—will jump right out to endorse any of the stuff I gave him today. But he’s definitely thinking about it, especially in light of that memo Väinöla handed him a few weeks ago. And, whatever else happens, I’ve got it into the official record that my local agents’ ‘confidential sources’ are reporting Manty involvement, whether Väinöla’s are or not. So when the time comes, that information will be there ready to point attention straight at Manticore.”
“Good,” Claire said. She sipped wine and smiled at him. “Let’s go ahead and get the rest of your regular data dump out of the way, Rajmund. I’m feeling especially impatient this evening. I’m sure—” her smile broadened and she licked her lips slowly “—that your colleagues’ bugs will get a vigorous workout tonight!”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“Good to see you again, Rufino. I wish the circumstances were better.”
Rufino Chernyshev nodded soberly as he shook Collin Detweiler’s hand. Detweiler stood at the corner of his desk, still leaning on a cane, and his expression was less than happy.
“I wish the circumstances were better, too. And I hope what actually happened isn’t as bad as the rumors I’ve heard.”
“That would depend on the rumors.” Detweiler smiled bleakly. “After all, the newsies’ accounts only cover the visible parts of how badly we got hurt.”
Chernyshev’s face tightened.
“I was afraid that might be the case,” he said. “Especially because I wasn’t getting any official word from Isabel. I knew everyone must’ve been busy, but in the field we didn’t know—”
“She didn’t brief you because she’s dead.” Detweiler interrupted, his voice harsh, and despite himself, Chernyshev flinched. “We lost the entire Gamma Center,” Detweiler continued. “And we got hit with a cyber attack that did one hell of a lot more damage—to data storage and com channels—than it should have, especially given how short a window it had to work.”
