“Right!” said Mandela with a snap of his fingers. “Leading to either a popular uprising against the government—”
“—which, given the government’s vast technological advantage over the citizenry, is unlikely to succeed—”
“—or to a government crackdown.” Mandela paused before adding one more thought. “Or, with the election coming up, influencing us to choose an Exarch who will crack down on some of these elements.”
“They staged a riot to manipulate us?” Heather asked incredulously. “It’s not working too well.”
“They’re not done. This is a prelude. Whatever they have planned next is supposed to do the real work.”
“And what they’re planning is…”
Mandela, who had been wandering briskly around his office, abruptly stopped and slumped in his chair. “I have no idea.”
“If they’re trying to manipulate the election, who is it they want to win?”
Mandela smiled wanly. “Before I could take a stab at that, I’d need to know what they were up to.”
“Now for the truly difficult question. Is one of our number using the KR to get themselves elected?”
“No,” Mandela said firmly. But he shifted in his chair.
Heather, watching him squirm, remained silent.
“At least, I hope not,” Mandela finally said. “This is not our way, funding terrorists to do work that, all our lives, we’ve performed directly for ourselves. I know the Paladins well enough that I have difficulty believing any of them would be involved with this group. But in the current political climate, I cannot offer any guarantees.”
“Plus,” Heather added, “we have two Paladins who many of us don’t know very well.”
“Redburn appointed them, and I trust his judgment,” Mandela said. “But you’re right. We don’t know them.”
Heather didn’t have to look for Duncan when she left Mandela’s office. He pounced when he saw her.
“We’re up to three bomb threats in the Hall of Government today,” he said. “Would you like to know who sent them?”
“No.”
“I should tell you a mysterious package was found on the eighth floor.”
“A bomb?”
“No. A misplaced data screen.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“To keep—”
“—me informed. Fine. How did your conversation with the receptionist go?”
Duncan’s eyes brightened. “Oh, right! Interesting!”
Heather fervently wished Duncan had learned something besides the woman’s phone number.
“It turns out she’s new here. She’d been working for a Senator for a while, but just got transferred out.”
“Okay.”
“She says she got transferred because she caught her boss sneaking a rendezvous with some guy from the diplomatic corps.”
“Sex?”
“Maybe. But something else, too,” Duncan said, attempting an air of careful sophistication. “Getting transferred doesn’t do anything, really, to keep her from talking. She’s free to spread rumors about them as much as she wants, like she did with me. But what she can’t do anymore is watch them. If they’re up to something else, she’s not in position anymore to find out what it is.”
“That’s good thinking,” Heather said, trying not to sound surprised. “Did she happen to mention any names?”
Duncan smiled. “She certainly did.”
35
St. Croix Office Equipment Warehouse, Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
13 December 3134
At night, the warehouse compound of St. Croix Office Equipment and Consumables, located in Geneva’s industrial outer ring, resembled nothing so much as a large, empty shoebox. The site scarcely looked the same as the busy commercial depot that by day received and sent out crates and pallets of manufactured goods—desks, chairs, computers, short-run printing and binding equipment, cleaning equipment and supplies, and reams and reams of paper.
Geneva was the home of the largest bureaucracy in The Republic of the Sphere, and the city’s appetite for office supplies was insatiable. This particular St. Croix warehouse was only one of dozens of such ugly rectangular buildings located out of sight of the elegant and historic city center, but conveniently close to the main transit arteries required for making deliveries.
This last fact prompted the Kittery Renaissance leader, Cullen Roi, to settle on the warehouses of the St. Croix chain as the target for tonight’s work.
Cullen Roi had sent Hansel to supervise the job. Norah would have liked to come as well, but Cullen knew that she couldn’t be trusted with this kind of mission. She was an excellent agent provocateur, one of the best at stirring up trouble and being long gone by the time it came to a head, but she was neither patient nor quiet.
Hansel, on the other hand, was a realist, completely lacking in vanity. His focus was on getting the job done well and quickly, and getting out. Speed was of the essence, since Hansel had several stops to make before the night was over.
Hansel steered a delivery truck up to the warehouse compound’s security gate. The truck was a massive tandem special, two containers in line; the false St. Croix markings on its sides were indistinguishable from the real thing. The cargo inside the two containers, however, was not office equipment.
The night guard at the complex gate had been keeping himself awake in his glass-enclosed box by watching reruns of For Clan and Honor on a console-top tri-vid display. He didn’t look happy to see a big truck stopped at the barrier outside. He came out anyway, a disgusted expression on his face.
“You don’t get in without papers.”
“I’ve got papers,” Hansel said. He did indeed have papers; excellent forgeries, the best that Cullen Roi could provide. “Just wait a minute.”
He retrieved the forged papers from the truck cab’s under-dash compartment and made a show of looking through them before handing them out the window. “Here.”
“Not my job to let people in or out. Just my job to watch the gate.”
The guard took the papers anyway, and read through them, frowning. His lips didn’t move as he read, but Hansel suspected that it was a near thing. When he was done he raised his head and eyed Hansel with mistrust.
“It says here you were supposed to be delivering this stuff at five this afternoon.”
“Stuff happens,” said Hansel. “At five this afternoon I blew a flux circuit. I had to spend good money getting it fixed, too.”
The guard scowled like a teacher listening to an excuse for late homework. Hansel waited calmly.
The guard said, “You couldn’t have laid up somewhere for the night, could you?”
“Sorry,” Hansel said. “I’ve got things to do at home tomorrow. All I want to do is unload this stuff and be on my way.”
“Pass on through, then.”
“I need the papers back after you’ve signed them,” Hansel reminded him.
“Right.” The guard scrawled his name with a St. Croix giveaway pen and returned the papers. “Ramp’s around behind back. And don’t expect any help from me with the unloading.”
“Thank you,” said Hansel politely, but the man was already retreating into his lighted box.
The guard pressed a button on the security console, and the gate swung open. Hansel drove the big tandem truck into the warehouse compound and around to the rear of the main building. He stopped next to the loading dock, which was conveniently out of sight from the gate—yet another reason why this warehouse was one of the Kittery Renaissance’s chosen sites.
He got down from the cab, went over to the first container of the tandem pair, and knocked on the side panel.
“You guys can come out now.”
The panel slid open with a metallic groan, loud in the darkness. Hansel wasn’t unduly worried about the noise. Their presence inside the warehouse compound had been accepted and accounted for, and work sounds would be expected.
; A half-dozen men climbed out of the first container. Like Hansel, they were dressed in workers’ coveralls with the St. Croix company logo embroidered across the shoulders in back. Maybe in storybooks and tri-vids the secret operatives made themselves invisible by dressing all in black, but Hansel knew better than that. Nobody in Geneva was as invisible as a manual laborer in his working attire.
“We don’t have much time,” he said as soon as the last man emerged from the container. “Get moving.”
The men swung a ramp down from the open side panel and began unloading boxes. The labels on the boxes identified them as containing preassembled metal filing cabinets and collapsible tri-vid reception tanks, manufactured by third parties and repackaged with the St. Croix logo.
Deceptive packaging, Hansel thought with amusement, in more ways than one. The boxes actually held an assortment of pistols—auto-pistols, lasers, and flamers—a few rifles and shotguns, and the ammunition to go with them, enough in this truck alone to outfit at least a company. Not all of them were likely to be needed, but there was no way to tell in advance which of the group’s weapons stockpiles would see the heaviest use on the day itself. It was necessary, therefore, to fully supply all of them.
The Kittery Renaissance had sunk a large percentage of its liquid funds into this project. If it failed, the movement would be toothless for a while, money depleted, members dead, or lost in the disappointment of failure. Those kinds of losses could spell the end of the whole organization.
We’ll just have to succeed, Hansel thought.
Hansel had the key codes for the locks on the warehouse doors. He got them open in seconds, both the small door at the top of the loading ramp, and the big garage-style door next to it. Inside, the warehouse was full of containers like the ones being off-loaded from the truck.
“Jacques, Benny,” he said. “Get down here and move some of this stuff out of the way.”
Two men, both built like drilling ’Mechs, detached themselves from the group of laborers. Jacques asked, “Where do you want us to put the stuff we’re moving?”
“Stack it a bit higher, move the boxes a bit closer together… we want our stuff mixed in with it, but still easy to find in a hurry.”
“Right you are, boss.”
“And make certain to leave enough room for the big surprise. We don’t want to spoil the day by having it found too soon.”
The men laughed and began shifting boxes. When all of the weapons and ammunition had been safely unloaded and concealed, Hansel returned to the truck. He mounted into the cab, started the engine, and brought the truck around so that he could back it through the big door and into the warehouse. It wouldn’t all fit—the cab and the front container were still outside—but the rear container was inside and out of sight. He hit the button on the cab console to open the back door of the rear container and lower its heavy-duty hydraulic ramp.
That done, he climbed down from the cab again. “All right, take her out.”
Two of the men climbed up into the container, the others waited outside it. A moment later a Fox armored car emerged from the truck’s dark interior, was pushed down the ramp and braced by the team to keep it from rolling out of control.
“Boss?” said Benny. “How are we going to hide something like that?”
“You’ll see.”
Soon, the armored car had been covered with a canvas drop cloth, its outline under the cloth obscured by boxes of office supplies—innocent ones this time—stacked on its flat surfaces. Half a dozen similar canvas drop cloths went over random piles of crates throughout the warehouse.
“The armored car doesn’t have to stay hidden forever,” Hansel explained. “Just so no one looks at it until Friday, that’s long enough.”
The work crew got back into the truck container. Hansel shut the warehouse doors and climbed into the cab. Shortly afterward, he was signing back out through the compound gate, on his way to repeat the process twelve more times, at different locations, before dawn brought returning workers and increased traffic to the streets of Geneva.
36
First Stop Bar, Geneva
Terra, Prefecture X
16 December 3134
Another late evening in a string of too many found Jonah Levin once more in workingman’s clothing at the First Stop Bar. He was drinking beer with a chaser again, amid a crowd hoping to drink enough to forget the past 365 days. It made him feel old, revisiting the bad habits of his youth, even for a good purpose. The things we do for The Republic, he thought; I ought to be at home on Kervil with Anna, not sitting here drinking by myself.
This evening, after a long day of interviews, Jonah had found a message from former-sergeant Turk waiting for him at the Pension Flambard asking for a meeting. From one meeting to another to another, Jonah thought to himself. I’m really a politician now. He yearned to have someone try to kill him, if only to break up the meetings.
After reading the note left for him at the front desk in Madame’s careful handwriting, he’d changed out of his regular clothing and into his workingman’s disguise, then slipped out through the back entrance of the pension.
This close to the election, there was no telling when a roving tri-vid reporter or some faction’s spies might decide to get ambitious and stake out the front door. He was certain that most of them already knew where he stayed when he was in Geneva; after all, he’d never made any attempt to conceal it. Fortunately, Madame Flambard’s discretion was phenomenal, and she was willing to go considerable lengths to protect the privacy of a long-time returning guest.
The First Stop Bar was as dim as before and, thankfully, filled with conversation on every topic except politics. People discussed music, vids, sports, their jobs—but not the election. Jonah let the cleansing flow of casual discussion soothe his jangling nerves. He sat at a table in the back, listening to the scraps of conversation drifting past him while carefully presenting a front of a misanthropic solitary drinker. And as such, he was left alone until late in the evening, when Turk finally showed up.
The former sergeant collected his own beer-and-chaser from the bar and joined Jonah at the table. “Good to see you made it here,” he said. “I couldn’t tell if the woman I left the message with was going to pass it along or not.”
“That’s Madame Flambard.” Jonah smiled. “She’s protective of her guests’ privacy. But extremely reliable.”
“Reliable’s good.”
“Yes. Your message made it sound like you had some information to pass along.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
That was unusual, Jonah reflected. He didn’t recall Turk ever being unsure about anything, back on Kurragin. “‘If it’s worth noticing, it’s worth reporting,’” he said—he was quoting himself from that long-ago time, yet another sign that he was getting old. “Pass it on up and let somebody else sort it out.”
“This isn’t about what you asked me, about the government offices,” Turk said. “I haven’t heard anything from that team yet. This is something different—but if it’s what I think it is, then somebody needs to know about it in a hurry.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense, Sergeant. Spit it out.”
“Here goes, then.” Turk took a long pull at his beer, then settled back in his chair. “The first thing is that my people don’t just work at the government buildings. The Republic gave us our first big custodial contract, all right, and that arrangement is still our bread and butter, but the outfit’s picked up quite a few other clients since you helped me get started.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah. Anyhow, when I put the word out that a friend of mine from way back was looking for information about stuff going on where it shouldn’t be, I didn’t expect anything to happen quite this soon. I thought people would still be trying to make up their minds whether they’d seen something wrong or not.
“But this morning, I had the guy in charge of the St. Croix contract show up in my office with one of his people, a kid by the na
me of Bruno who does cleaning detail in one of the St. Croix warehouses in the outer ring of the city.”
“Reliable?”
“Not especially. Just not quite unreliable enough to entirely ignore. You know the type.”
“I’ve run into it once or twice,” Jonah admitted. “You don’t often get that sort volunteering information, though. What happened?”
“Well… Bruno ran across something that scared him enough to tell his boss about it, and his boss took one look and brought him over to talk to me.”
“What was it?”
“Bruno says—” the skepticism was evident in Turk’s voice “—that he was just shifting a crate so that he could run the floor cleaner over that area when it somehow broke open.”
Jonah couldn’t suppress a low chuckle. “We’ve heard that song before.”
“He swears the crate opened all by itself.”
“As crates will do,” agreed Jonah, still smiling. “Go on. I’m assuming that what he saw wasn’t—what is it that St. Croix sells?”
“Office supplies.”
“—that the crate wasn’t full of paper clips and manila mailing envelopes.”
“No,” said Turk. “It was full of guns.”
Jonah straightened abruptly. “That’s… not what I was expecting.”
“I don’t think it was what our friend Bruno was expecting, either.” Turk knocked back the chaser to his beer and continued. “So I told Bruno that I ought to fire him for what both of us knew he’d been up to when that crate came open, but that he’d done the right thing by coming to me about the rifles, so I was letting it go. This time. Then I gave him three weeks’ vacation with pay and told him the weather was lovely in the Azores at this time of year and he should go there and think about the value of being a good employee.”
“A good move,” said Jonah. “Safer for him, safer for us.”
“I thought that it might be.” Turk paused and looked curiously at Jonah. “You don’t think that all of this has something to do with Paladin Steiner-Davion’s murder, do you? If he’d found out—”
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