Morrow nodded. “Well, so do I,” she said calmly. “That’s why I have bodyguards.”
Rachel managed a faint smile. “With all due respect, I’m sure your bodyguard is perfectly adequate for dealing with run-of-the-mill problems. However, in all three cases to date the assassin succeeded in passing through a secured zone and making an unobstructed getaway. This tells us that we’re not dealing with an ordinary lunatic — we’re dealing with a formidable professional, or even a team. Ordinary guards don’t cut it. If I was the killer, you would be dead by now. My briefcase could be loaded with a bomb, your bodyguard could be shot with his own weapon … do you see?”
Elspeth nodded reluctantly.
“I’m here to keep you alive,” Rachel said quietly. “There’s a — well, I can’t go into our sources. But we think there’s probably going to be an attempt on your life between six and ten days from now.”
“Oh.” Morrow shook her head. Oddly, she seemed to relax a trifle, as if the immediacy of the warning, the concreteness of the high jeopardy, gave her something to cling to. “What do you think you can do if this master assassin wants to kill me?”
The waiter arrived with Rachel’s order on a tray. “Oh, I can think of half a dozen possibilities,” Rachel said. She smiled tiredly. Then she peered at Elspeth’s face closely until the ambassador blinked. “We’ll have to run it past the ship’s surgeon, but I think Plan A can be made to work.”
“What? What have you got in mind?”
“Plan A is the shell game.” Rachel put her glass down. “We’re assuming that our unidentified but highly competent assassins are also well informed. If this is the case, they’ll probably learn or guess that you’ve been warned before they set up the hit. So what George would like to do is play a shell game with them. Step zero is to send Dr. Baxter off-planet — somewhere where we’re fairly certain there are no assassins. We’d like you to ensure that you’ve got as few public appearances and important meetings as possible during the window of opportunity.
“And then … well, I’m about your height, and the body mass difference can be finessed with padding and loose clothing. The real trick will be getting the face and hair and posture right. We’re going to ensure that for your remaining public appearances you have a body double. Bait, in other words. You will be hiding in a locked room in a nuclear bunker with a closed-cycle air supply and half an assault division sitting on top of it — or as a guest on board a UN diplomatic yacht, sovereign territory of Earth, with a couple of cruisers from the New Dresden navy keeping an eye on it, if you prefer. It’s up to you: they want to keep you alive, too, as long as those missiles are heading in this direction. But I’m going to hang my tail out where someone can try to grab it — not with a long gun, but up close and personal, so we can snatch them.”
Elspeth looked at her with something like awe — or whatever the appropriate expression was for dealing with suicidal idiots. “How much do they pay you to do this job?” she asked. “I’ve heard some foolhardy things in my time, but that’s about the craziest—” She shook her head.
“I don’t do this for money,” Rachel murmured. Responsibility. Get it wrong, and nearly a billion people die. She glanced at the square. “I was here about ten years ago. Did you ever take the time to go round the museums?”
“Oh, I’ve been round the Imperial Peace Museum and the People’s Palace of the Judiciary,” Elspeth replied. “Captured it all.” She tapped a broad signet ring and a sapphire spot blinked on it. “These people have the most remarkable history — more history than a world ought to have, if you ask me.” She fixed Rachel with a contemplative stare. “Did you know they’ve had more world wars than Old Earth?”
“I was vaguely aware of that,” Rachel said drily, having crammed three thousand pages of local history on her first journey here, many years earlier. “How are the museums these days?”
“Big. Oh, this month there’s a most extensive display of regional burial costumes, some sort of once-in-a-decade exhibition that’s on now.” Slowing even more, Elspeth continued thoughtfully: “There was a whole gallery explaining the sequence of conquests that enabled the Eastern Empire to defeat their enemies in the south and get a stranglehold on the remaining independent cornucopia-owning fabwerks. Fascinating stuff.”
“Nothing on the mass graves, I take it,” Rachel observed.
“No.” Elspeth shook her head. “Nor the blank spots on the map of North Transylvania.”
“Ah.” Rachel nodded. “They haven’t gotten around to talking about it yet?”
“Life extension, amnesia extension. It takes longer to admit to the crimes when the criminals are still taking an active role in government.” Elspeth drained her glass, then looked away. “Why were you there?” she murmured.
“War crimes commission. I’d rather not talk about it, thanks.” Rachel finished her drink. “I’d better get back to the embassy to start preparations.” She noticed Elspeth’s expression. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to get under way as soon as possible. It’s going to take time to work up to this. I think I’ll skip the museums.”
For a moment she felt agonizingly old: she felt every minute of her age, a length of time no human being could endure without learning to ignore it from moment to moment. She had made a habit of reinventing her life every thirty years, forcing herself to adopt new habits and attitudes and friends, but even so a common core of identity remained; a bright spark of rage against the sort of people who could do the sort of thing that had happened in North Transylvania, less than a century earlier. One of Rachel’s most recent peculiarities was that she’d recently found that museums made her feel ill, physically nauseous, with their depictions of horrors and atrocities disguised as history — especially when they were horrors and atrocities that she had lived through. Or worse, their glib evasions and refusals to face the truth.
“I could—” Elspeth shook her head. “There’s more to you than you’re letting on.”
Rachel smiled at her sourly. “Why, thank you very much.” She sniffed. “I said my job was about bomb disposal. But maybe it’d be more accurate to say I’m in the business of abolishing history.”
“Abolishing history?” The Ambassador frowned. “That sounds positively revisionist.”
“I mean, abolishing the kinds of events they build places like the Imperial Peace Museum to remember.” She glanced at Elspeth. “Your call?”
Ambassador Morrow stared at her through half-narrowed eyes. “I think your ambition is very laudable,” she said slowly. “And I’d like to hear about your experiences here sometime.” But not right now. I don’t want to lose my lunch, Rachel projected cynically. “Meanwhile, why don’t you work with Willem here to arrange a follow-on meeting, at our mutual convenience?”
“I’ll do that.” Rachel nodded. “Take care.”
“I shall,” said Morrow, standing up and holding her arms out for her coat. “You, too,” she said impulsively, then her bodyguards and secretary followed her, the latter watching Rachel mistrustfully as his mistress walked away. They vanished into the crowd, and her main course arrived. Rachel ate it slowly, her thoughts elsewhere. I wonder what Martin will think?
“You can’t be serious!”
She’d rarely seen him so disturbed, and never by something she’d told him: “Why? What makes you think I’m joking?”
“I—” He was pacing, always a bad sign. “I don’t.” Ah, a sign of realism. “I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.” He turned to face her, his back to the wall-screen of the promenade deck: with the almost flat horizon of the planet behind him, it looked as if he was walking on the atmosphere. “Please, Rachel. Please tell me this isn’t as bad as it sounds?”
She took a deep breath. “Martin, if I wanted to kill myself, do you think I’d go about it this indirectly?”
“No, but I think your sense of responsibility” — he saw where he was going almost before she did, and swerved to avoid the abyss �
� “may lead you into working within operational constraints that you don’t need to be bound by.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Phew. Don’t mean to lecture you. It’s your specialty, and so on.” Then he looked at her, with worry in his eyes, and she felt herself beginning to melt: “But are you sure it’s safe?”
“Don’t you go quoting William Palmer’s last words at me,” she threw back at him. “Of course I’m not sure it’s safe!” She folded her arms defensively. “It’s as safe as I can make it, and for sure it’s safer than letting some lunatic sign a death warrant for 800 million mostly innocent people. But it’s not safe-safe. Now if you’re through trying to mother me, will you listen while I talk you through the threat tree and tell me if you spot anything that everybody else has missed?”
“The threat tree—” Martin almost went cross-eyed trying to hold the topic in his head. “Rachel?”
“Oh shit!” She looked at him with mingled affection and exasperation. Two years of being married to him hadn’t blunted the former, but she’d been a big girl with her own life before Martin — in his late sixties, despite looking like a midtwentysomething — had been even a twinkling in his mother’s eye. And sometimes she felt like a cradle snatcher. He didn’t yet have the chilly detachment that came from having a child die of avoidable old age, embraced by reason of either religious conviction or plain old-fashioned boredom with life. Maybe he never would, and she’d love him no less for it, but at times it made him a mite hard to live with. “Do you really think that I’d do something rash enough to cost me this?” She took two steps forward and buried her chin in the base of his neck, as his arms automatically wrapped around her.
“I know you would, Rache. I know about you and your quixotic campaigns to fix entire fucked-up planets. Remember?”
She whispered in his ear: “Only because you’d do the same.”
“Yeah, but I was doing it strictly cash on delivery. And for the best possible reason.” Because the nearest thing this crazy universe could provide to a deity had phoned him up one day and asked him how much he’d charge for sabotaging time machines before the lunatics who built them could switch them on and destroy the coherency of history, including the chain of events leading to the creation of the god in question. “You tend to do it when you get overenthusiastic.”
“No, I tend to do it when I get angry,” she replied, and goosed him. He yelped. “You don’t like it when I get angry!”
“No, no, I like you fine.” He gasped. She laughed: she couldn’t help herself. A moment later Martin was chuckling, too, leaning on her shoulder for support.
After a while they sobered up. “I’m not going to let some crazy get close enough to kill me, Martin. I’m just going to wear the face and stand at the back of a room with a couple of tons of concealed security in front of me. I want them to think they’ve got a clean shot at me, not give them the real thing.”
“I’ve seen too many harebrained schemes like this go wrong.” She let go of him, took a step back to watch his face. “And it leaves me feeling like a spare wheel. Not” — he glanced over his shoulder — “that I’m anything else, here.”
“Well, that’s what you get for marrying into the diplomatic corps.” She frowned. “But there’s one thing you could do for me. I asked George, and he says it’s okay. It’s not dangerous—”
“Not dangerous?” He squinted suspiciously. “That’ll be a first for something you cooked up.”
“Shut up. Listen, George thought it would be a good idea if while I’m at the Muscovite embassy running this little honeypot scheme, you took a trip up the beanstalk and had a guided tour of the Romanov while she’s in dock. Your usual employer built bits of her, and I can get you an intro with the Captain. I just want you to go take a look around, see if you smell anything fishy. We can make it official if you want.”
“The last time you guys wanted me to go take an unofficial sniff around a ship I seem to recall we both got shanghaied into a six-month cruise to a war zone,” he said drily.
“That’s not the idea this time.” She smiled, then turned away. Mixed memories: Martin had not enjoyed the experience much, and at the time neither had she, but if it hadn’t happened, they wouldn’t have met, wouldn’t have married, wouldn’t be together. It was too easy, after the event, to gloss over the dark, frightening aspects of a bad experience inextricably linked to something else that was very good indeed. “I’m not sure what, if anything, I expect you to find. Probably nothing, but if you can hit on the Captain for a full passenger manifest including stopovers, and ask around if anyone’s been behaving oddly. I mean, if there’s a passenger in first class who never shows up at dinner because the voices in his head tell him to stay in his cabin and polish the guns…”
“Check.” He sighed. “It’s a WhiteStar ship, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Why, is that good or bad?”
“Commercial, very commercial. I hope you guys have got something on the bottom line to offer the Captain, or he’s not going to be too keen on wasting time on someone like me.”
“She, Captain Nazma Hussein. And she’s not going to yelp too loudly. Why do you think George put you on the payroll? She doesn’t need to know you’re down as an unpaid intern; just turn up and wave your diplomatic passport at her and act polite but firm. If you get any shit, pass it on to George.” She grinned. “It’s about the only perk of the job.”
“You’re going to take care, aren’t you?” He stared at her.
“You bet.”
“Okay.” He closed the gap between them, and she wrapped her arms around him. He leaned close to kiss her forehead. “Let’s hope you can get this nailed down so we can go home soon.”
“Oh, I’m sure we will.” She held him tight. “And I’m not going to take any risks, Martin. I want to live long enough to see that child of ours decanted.”
Three days of frenetic preparation passed like quicksilver running down a rainy gutter, until:
“Four hours ago? First passengers should have hit the terminal when? Very good. Thanks, I’ll be ready.” Rachel flipped her phone shut and tried to get her racing pulse back under control. “It’s started,” she called through the open door.
“Come over here. I want to give this a last run-through,” said Tranh.
Rachel walked across the hand-woven rug and paused in the open doorway. “What kind of way is that to talk to a foreign ambassador?” she asked, forcing herself to stand with her legs slightly apart, the way Elspeth did. Tranh was waiting in the Ambassador’s bedroom with Gail and a worried-looking Jane, still busy setting up the mobile communications switch on Morrow’s desk. Like Rachel, Gail was dressed for a formal diplomatic reception: unlike Rachel, she wore her own face along with the dark suit and gown of office of a dignitary.
Tranh peered at her intently. “Hair,” he said.
“Let me look.” Gail approached Rachel, holding a brush as if it were a handgun. “No, looks all right to me. Hmm.” She reached out and adjusted a stray wisp. “How does it feel?”
Rachel grimaced. “Like wearing a rubber mask, how do you think it feels?”
“As long as you can wear it comfortably. No slipping?”
“No. Membrane pumps seem to be fine.” The layered gunk was threaded with osmotic pumps, able to suck up sweat from down below and exude it through realistic-looking pores.
“Other stuff?”
“Fine.” Rachel turned round slowly. “Can’t bend over too easily. Wish the armor could sweat, too.”
“Your gun’s showing,” Tranh said critically. “When you let the robe fall open — that’s better.” Rachel hitched it into place. “Hmm. Looks okay to me. Wire test.” There were no wires, but an elaborate mix of military-grade intelligent comms to tie the ambush team together.
“Testing, testing.”
Tranh held up a hand. “Tests out okay. Can you hear me?” She winced, and he hastily hit a slider on the communications panel. “That better?” She nodded.
Glu
ed into a skintight mask, wearing somebody else’s clothes over body armor and trying to conceal a handgun, Rachel felt anything except better. But at least Martin was out of the picture for the moment — on his way up the planetary beanstalk to poke around the liner docked in geosynchronous orbit. “Gail, remind me of the order of battle?”
“The order — oh.” She cleared her throat. “It’s 1730. Doors open, 1800. We’re expecting Subminister for Cultural Affairs Ivan Hasek, the usual dozen or so cultural attaches, deputy ambassadors, sixteen assorted business dignitaries, including six locals anxious to resolve reparations lawsuits, three from Septagon, who’re concerned about commodity futures in event of a rather unpleasant future shortage of Dresdeners to trade with them, and seven export agents for defunct Muscovite firms. There’s Colonel Ghove of the Ministry of Education, Professor-Doctor Franck from the Ministry of Internal Enlightenment, the diva Rhona Geiss, who is apparently due to sing for us, about a billion journalists — four, actually — and a few dozen refugees who live here or are passing through and took up the invitation. Plus the caterers, a quartet of musicians, eight dancers, three entertainers, eleven waiters, a bunch of students on a cultural exchange trip, a video crew making a documentary about what happens to nations after their planet dies, and a partridge in a pear tree. I double-checked the list with Pritkin and the ambassador, and you’ve got a clear field — no existing acquaintances according to your service log.”
“Delightful.” Rachel winced. “Horizon is five hours off. Got any rat’s liver pills for me?”
Gail produced a strip of tablets with a flourish and a small grin. “Have one on me.”
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