by Rick Partlow
“Your lips to God’s ears, sir,” McKay said with a nervous laugh. “But I have something else I wanted to tell you. It’s Mironov…Admiral, I think he’s not mentally stable.” He sighed. “To be honest, I think he’s totally fucking bugnuts.”
“Do you think this affects the reliability of the data he’s provided us?” Patel asked, steepling his fingers in front of him as he regarded McKay carefully.
“I don’t believe so. He’s not trying to deceive us…I just think his hold on reality is tenuous. As far as I can tell, he seems to regard everything happening around him as little more real than a ViR simulation.”
“You’ll have to keep an eye on him, McKay, but right now, I think he’s given us everything we can get from him and we have Antonov to worry about. Tell your people to get some sleep and get some food in them. We head through that gate in thirty six hours.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Wooden planks creaked under Daniel O’Keefe’s shoes as he stepped out of the back door of the cabin, fastening his jacket against the chill in the air. Spring in northern Minnesota was colder than winter in Capital City.
I’m getting soft, he thought to himself with a trace of bitterness. He’d once been used to the cold, fond of it even. He’d spent most of his youth in the family home outside Calgary, and it was no colder here than it had been there. But he’d spent too much of his life in Capital City, first as a Senator and then as President, and now he needed a jacket where once he would have worn shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Old and soft.
He sat in the padded deck chair on the back porch of the cabin and stared up at the night sky. The stars were incredibly clear out here, away from the cities; countless hundreds of thousands of them stretched overhead in a breathtaking Sistine-Chapel ceiling painted by a universe-spanning divine Michelangelo. When he was a young man, O’Keefe had been fashionably atheistic, but as he grew older he found himself leaning towards something closer to a Jeffersonian Deism. He still couldn’t envision any sort of personal deity that meddled in the day-to-day affairs of men---or other beings---but he could very easily imagine a Watchmaker God that set the universe in motion then sat back to observe.
At the moment, he wished he could believe in a more personal God…because he very much wanted to pray. His son in law, a man he had trusted more than any other, a man he imagined could someday hold the very office he now occupied, was dead in a senseless act of violence that he still couldn’t fathom or understand. His daughter, the person who meant the most to him in all the world, someone he also envisioned as President one day, was missing for over a week.
How the hell, he raged inwardly, not for the first time, did the President’s daughter, a Republic Senator, go missing in this day and age?
Her car had been found abandoned in the Old City. The woman she’d gone there to meet was also missing and the security teams that had gone over the area had found nothing…except an unexplained blood stain in a nearby building. The press hadn’t stopped hounding him and everyone connected to his administration, interfering with his attempts to find her…
And then, over a very, very secure and private ‘link that only he and Jason McKay had supposedly known about, Shannon Stark had contacted him yesterday and told him to find a way to get out to Glen and Valerie’s vacation cabin and to bring Natalia with him.
He hadn’t told anyone why he was out here, just said that he needed a break from the pressure due to his daughter’s disappearance and his son-in-law’s murder. His staff had been quietly apoplectic at the thought of leaving Capital City with an economic crisis looming and the Biomech bill being argued in the Senate, and his Presidential Security Service agents had practically thrown a fit at the idea of an unscheduled visit to such an unprotected spot.
But he had put his foot down and here he was. There were no agents and no staff on the grounds of the cabin, just a security perimeter thrown up at the major roads within twenty kilometers and a complete air cordon. Natalia was asleep inside…finally. His gut clenched at the memory of her helpless cries for her mother and father, at her sobs as she cried herself to sleep in her mother’s bed. He’d fought back sobs himself, remembering how Valerie had cried all night the day her mother had been killed in a terrorist attack in Europe so many years ago.
His ‘link buzzed in his pocket and he pulled the bud off of it and put it in his ear.
“O’Keefe,” he snapped.
“Mr. President,” he heard the voice of Agent Havelock, his chief of security. “There’s a flitter approaching the air cordon. It’s registered to a rental company in Houston ‘plex. We hailed it and all the driver would say was that you were expecting company.”
“Let it through,” O’Keefe ordered instantly. “And Havelock, I don’t want any record it was ever here.”
“Yes, sir,” the man said with a resigned sigh.
O’Keefe broke the connection and levered himself from the chair. He could hear the whine of the turbines as the flitter came in over the lake, though he couldn’t see it: it was running without lights and there was no moon tonight. He had a vague impression of something dark passing in front of the stars and a wind tugged at his hair, rustled the leaves on the trees around the lake.
Then he could see the shape of it, a black shadow across his vision as it landed in the meadow beyond the back porch, the fan humming as it slowed, the turbine whining down. He forced himself not to run as he approached it, even as the clamshell doors opened and light leaked out from the interior, silhouetting the vehicle’s passengers as they clambered out.
But when the light fell on the face of one and he saw that it was Valerie, he couldn’t hold back: he ran across the meadow and pulled her into his arms, half sobbing as he held her.
“Oh my God, honey, I am so glad you’re alive! When they found your car…”
“I’m sorry, daddy,” she said soothingly. “I am so sorry I put you through all this.”
O’Keefe held her at arm’s length, looking her up and down. “Are you all right? Were you hurt? What were you doing in the Old City anyway?”
“I’m fine, daddy,” she assured him. “We should go inside: we need to talk.”
For the first time, O’Keefe looked beyond Valerie to Shannon, who was sealing the flitter’s doors. “Tell me you didn’t involve my daughter in your cloak-and-dagger bullshit, Stark,” he hissed.
Shannon winced, hesitated.
“Daddy,” Valerie interrupted, putting a hand on his arm, “don’t. I called her. I didn’t accept the circumstances of Glen’s death and I wanted to look into it, but I knew it would be dangerous, so I asked her to back me up. She kept me safe.”
O’Keefe’s expression softened and regret showed on his face. “I’m sorry, Major Stark,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just been a very…stressful few days.”
“I’m afraid it’s going to get much worse, Mr. President,” she told him. “Let’s go inside…we have a lot to talk about.”
From the opposite side of the desk, Shannon watched the President’s eyes get wider and wider as he watched one video after another, culminating with the video recording of Liam’s testimony.
“God in Heaven,” O’Keefe breathed. He looked up at Shannon, then back and forth between her and Valerie, disbelief in his eyes. “You can’t be saying…I can’t believe…” He dithered, trying to come up with something coherent to say. “What proof do we have of any of this?”
“Well sir,” Shannon ticked off on her finger, “we have first-hand testimony that the Colonial Guard mutiny is real, and we have eyewitness evidence that it is connected to the multicorps via this Lone Star Security, where Hellene D’Annique works. Colonel Lee was told by D’Annique that there would be an assassination attempt on you via an orbital strike timed to coincide with the return of the Decatur---well, let me clarify, we think he meant the Decatur, we have no names or specific ships. We also know that the merc who murdered Glen Mulrooney and tried to kill Valerie was hired by a shell company with
ties to Lone Star Security, and we know he was only hired to do this after Glen began asking his friend the journalist to look into the background of Vice President Dominguez.”
She shook her head. “As for the rest…we only have Mr. Bryant’s testimony under chemical interrogation to say that Antonov was involved with this or that this story about…” She searched for a word. “…duplication, I suppose, is true. Investigator Kovach vouches for the accuracy of information obtained through the combination of drugs, but there is no psycho-medical study that confirms that those memories are real and not fantasy. Still sir,” she pointed out forcefully, “something happened on that trip to Aphrodite. Bryant was on it and immediately developed psychological problems. D’Annique was on it and immediately quit the Fleet and is now working against your government. And Vice President Dominguez was on it and is, we know, at least tangentially involved in all this.
“Once is happenstance,” she quoted, “twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”
“If Antonov isn’t behind this,” Valerie said thoughtfully, “someone has gone through a lot of trouble to make us think he is. If the attack on the outpost was staged to draw away Jason or you, Shannon, and to get some of the Fleet out of the way…there has to be involvement by some of the top officers in the Republic Spacefleet.”
“Jesus,” O’Keefe murmured, burying his face in his hands for a moment. When he looked back up, his eyes were haunted, his face pale. “So either a sizable percentage of the military and the multicorps are conspiring in an elaborate plot to assassinate me and overthrow our elected government, or Antonov has access to technology that can duplicate people and has foisted a copy of the Vice President on us and brainwashed the entire crew of a starship, including Admiral Patel and possibly General Kage.” He laughed a bit maniacally. “I can’t honestly say which of those possibilities I find worse.”
Still chuckling, he stood from the desk and went to the bar against the far wall, pulling out a bottle of Scotch and pouring himself a tall glass of it. He downed half of it in one gulp, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath to steady himself. “I used to feel sorry for Greg Jameson, you know,” he went on, refilling his own glass and pouring one for each of them. “He had to handle Antonov’s invasion, being a prisoner, almost dying, the war…and of course the economic aftermath.” He set the glasses in front of both of the women at the desk, then retrieved his own and sat back down with them. “I used to think it wasn’t fair that all that was dumped on his head. Now…” He shook his head. “Now I wish that son of a bitch were back in office so he could deal with this.”
Valerie picked up her glass and took a long sip from it. “Daddy,” she said, “we…you have to make a decision. We have to do something and you have to be the one to make that call.”
O’Keefe caught Shannon’s eye. “You wouldn’t have come here without some ideas, Stark.”
“Yes, sir,” she confirmed, taking a long gulp from her own glass. The Scotch was old and smooth. “The most obvious course of action is to bring in D’Annique for interrogation and follow her trail up the line.”
“I assume there’s a downside to that other than the Constitutional and legal issues,” O’Keefe said dryly, “since that hasn’t stopped you so far.”
“The downside is that her disappearance would be noticed,” Shannon explained. “Which would give her superiors time to go to ground. Right now, so far as we know, whoever is behind this in the Fleet and the multicorps has no reason to think we’re onto any part of their plan beyond the Guard mutiny. If we grab D’Annique, they’ll know for sure, and whatever we did get from her might not be enough to make all the connections.”
“I see. So what are the alternatives?”
“Well,” she said, reluctantly, “there’s one that appeals to me on a visceral level but I doubt I can get you to approve.”
He looked at her and smiled shrewdly. “You want to put Xavier Dominguez in a hotbox and sweat him, don’t you, Major Stark?”
Shannon chuckled despite herself. “Yes, sir, I surely do. He’s the key to all this. None of it will work without him in place. If we take him off the board, we may remove the threat entirely.”
“That certainly makes sense,” O’Keefe admitted. “The problem is, we have no legal justification to do it; and unlike some psych burnout junior Fleet officer, we can’t make the Vice President disappear without raising more questions than I can answer and still stay president. No, barring an actual state of civil war, I don’t think kidnapping the Vice President is on the table.”
“Then there’s only one other option, sir,” Shannon told him. “We keep watching D’Annique and hope she leads us to someone bigger…and we wait for the other side to make their move and hope we can get you through it alive when it comes.”
O’Keefe slumped back in his seat, rubbing the back of his head tiredly. “If this isn’t Antonov,” he began uncertainly, “if it’s just a home-grown coup attempt…I wonder if I should approach Dominguez myself and try to make a deal.”
“Mr. President?” Shannon’s eyes went wide.
“Daddy, you can’t deal with these people!” Valerie exclaimed. “They murdered Glen!”
“Look, Major Stark, Valerie,” O’Keefe held up his hands palms-up in a helpless gesture, “I’m not sure if either of you realizes just how tenuous a position our economy is in right now. It can’t take another war, particularly not a bitter and bloody civil war. The economy will collapse, the Republic government will collapse and we will have one would-be warlord after another vying to take over what’s left. Millions of innocent people will die, maybe tens of millions. Nuclear weapons, kinetic kill weapons from space, biological weapons…if there’s a protracted civil war, any of those can and will be used.”
“What sort of a deal would you propose?” Shannon asked quietly, the wheels turning behind her eyes.
O’Keefe shrugged. “Whatever it would take. I would step down, let Dominguez take power peacefully.”
“He’ll start the forced emigration again,” Valerie reminded him. “Worse than before, since he’s in the multicorps’ pockets. And I doubt he’ll be willing to sit back and let the voters decide if he stays in office when the elections come up. You’ll be dooming the whole world---and many others---to dictatorship, Daddy.”
“And if the choice is between that and death, chaos, starvation and possibly the end of our civilization, honey? What do you think those who are forced to go to the colonies would choose, death or exile?”
“They should have the right to choose that for themselves!” she insisted, leaning over the desk towards him.
“Yes they should, sweetheart,” he agreed. “But if I can’t keep them safe any other way…”
“Mr. President,” Shannon interrupted, “I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. We don’t know that Antonov and his forces are not involved, and if they are, there really is no choice of stepping aside. Antonov will smash the Republic and install a dictatorship with him at the head and I think we both agree that is not something that is preferable to war, don’t we?”
“Yes,” O’Keefe acceded reluctantly. “If it is Antonov, we have no choice but to fight.”
“Well, sir,” she pointed out gently, “you’ve told us we can’t interrogate the Vice President. I’m not sure D’Annique would know even if we did grab her. So, we won’t know if it’s Antonov or not until after the conspirators make their move, will we?”
O’Keefe chuckled ruefully in admiration. “McKay always reminds me that you’re the brains of the operation, Major Stark. So, my noble sacrifice is put on hold. It seems we don’t have a choice but to wait this out.”
“Hold on,” Valerie said, eyes narrowing in thought. “You know, Daddy, maybe you should talk to Dominguez after all.”
“Val?” Shannon shot the other woman a questioning look.
“You were right, Shannon, we can’t surrender. And Daddy, you’re right, we can’t kidnap and interrogate the Vice Pr
esident.” Val grinned the grin of a shark that had just smelled blood. “But there’s no reason that Dominguez needs to know he’s being interrogated…”
* * *
Xavier Dominguez cut quite a figure, Roza Kovach admitted to herself as she watched the man step out of the flitter flanked by security agents. He was tall and trim with a look of whipcord strength beneath his perfectly tailored Italian suit, and his face was lean and sculpted, his dark eyes showing just the right touch of compassion and sympathy for a politician…or a salesman. Not that there was much difference between the two professions, she reflected cynically.
Right now, though, she could see in those salesman’s eyes a hint of the annoyance he must feel at being called away from Capital City out to President O’Keefe’s family home outside Calgary. The estate was large and well-tended, the house a multistory Tudor built over a century ago and pretty in a quaint sort of way. Roza had never been there before, of course, but she’d become very familiar with it in the last two days of preparation. She still felt hideously out of place, however, in the expensive designer business suit that Major Stark had insisted she wear.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Vice President,” she greeted him as he approached the back patio of the house, the security agents taking up their positions at its edge. “I’m Rachel Kosar from President O’Keefe’s Calgary office. He’s waiting for you in his office, if you’ll follow me…”
“He’s inside,” Ari told Shannon, watching Dominguez over a security monitor in a small office in a far corner of the house. It had been previously used as a guest room, but two days of frantic effort had filled it with monitoring equipment and various other high-tech gadgets brought in from the Special Operations training center by Tom Crossman.
“Get a baseline on his biometric readings,” she told him, pacing the small room behind him. She seemed, Ari thought, as nervous as he had ever seen her, and he couldn’t blame her. This was extremely risky, not only to their lives and careers but to the future of…hell, of humanity, he realized.
