by John Scalzi
The problem was that the Nidu were Earth’s closest allies in the Common Confederation. In politics as in high school, who you are is to a large extent defined by who you sit with at lunch, and there was no doubt about it, the Earth was sitting at the loser table. It was not, Bob Pope thought, the true destiny of the Earth in our universe to be counted among the diplomatic equivalent of the acne-ridden and the furtively masturbating.
A necessary step in escaping this fate was to turn Nidu from a nominally friendly ally to a vaguely hostile one. It wouldn’t do to have the Nidu as a full-fledged enemy, of course; despite Pope’s opinion of the Nidu’s station in galactic diplomacy, Nidu was still significantly more powerful than Earth and her tiny colonies. Burkina Faso or not, she could still squash the Earth like a bug. But an edgy relationship made for better defense allocations. Better defense allocations made for better ships, better soldiers, and better weapons. Better weapons made for more diplomatic respect. More diplomatic respect meant a chance to trade up on allies.
Pope was aware there were other ways to get more diplomatic respect than bigger guns, of course. But while other diplomatic maneuvers sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, ultimately a big damn gun always commanded respect. It was a simple diplomatic equation, and Bob Pope was not one for unnecessarily complicating things.
However, if it was necessary to complicate things, Pope could live with that, especially if in doing so he got close to his own goals. But especially if he were complicating things for someone he didn’t like. Like, say, that smug bastard Jim Heffer at the State Department.
Which is why, after Phipps had gotten him up to speed on the sheep issue, Pope made an executive decision. “We need to force State’s hand,” he said.
Phipps raised an eyebrow. “Why do we need to do that? They’re already going to come up empty. Relations are already going to be damaged.”
“It’s not enough,” Pope said. “They won’t be damaged enough. Heffer can still convince the Nidu they made the good faith effort. We need to poke a stick through that wheel.”
“Okay,” Phipps said, doubtfully; he wasn’t quite sure he followed the allusion. “What do you suggest?”
“The girl is going to be handled,” Pope said.
“Right,” Phipps said. No more need be said on that issue; from that point forward it was best that Pope didn’t know the specifics.
“Then we let the Nidu know she exists,” Pope said.
“We can’t do that,” Phipps said.
“We can’t,” Pope agreed. “But I’m sure that there are others who would be delighted to share the information.”
Phipps brightened. “I know just the man for the job.”
Deception, as practically manifested, succeeds because of two things. First, the object of deception is convincingly deceptive in its design; i.e., it looks/feels/acts like the real thing. Second, and equally important, the subject of deception must be predisposed to believing that the object of deception is indeed the real thing. These two criteria work in an inverse relationship with each other; a sufficiently deceptive object can convince a skeptical subject, while a subject who sincerely wants to believe will be able to overlook even gross flaws in the object onto which he or she confers belief.
Ted Soram, Secretary of Trade, desperately wanted to believe.
And why not. He’d had a bad week. Any week in which one of your trade negotiators kills his opposite number at the trade table, in front of witnesses from both sides, was not one destined for the all-time list of classic weeks.
But that’s not what was bothering Soram. Well, it was, but few people knew all the details. For as much as controversy was swirling around Soram and his department, Heffer and State had done a grand job of cleaning things up. It was galling to have had State’s flunkies crawling through Moeller’s office, but on the other hand it was better than having either the US or UNE Federal Bureau of Investigation driving their forensics microscopes up Trade’s ass. As bad as Moeller’s murder attempt (attempt? Success!) was, it was, quite literally, a State secret.
No, what was really chafing Soram across the ass was how little support he was getting during this particular moment of crisis. He didn’t shove a whatever-the-hell-that-was up Moeller’s bum and send him off to kill someone. He wasn’t the one that made the Nidu get up and walk out on trade negotiations, causing the markets to take a dump and everyone from Ecuadorian banana farmers to Taiwanese video game manufacturers to howl in protest. And yet it was he getting burned on the political shows and in the editorials, and, in at least one report he’d seen, in effigy at some fisherman protest in France.
He couldn’t even respond—President Webster’s folks had asked (read: told) him to avoid unscripted appearances after he told that joke about the Pakistani, the Indian, the pig, and the cow on a news show early in the administration. He still thought the reaction to that was overblown; he was just trying to make a point about cultural differences and trade. It wasn’t worth a week of riots. In his absence from the talk shows, Trade’s press secretary Joe McGinnis had been fielding the grilling on the cameras, that goddamned ham. Soram suspected that at least half of Washington’s reporters believed McGinnis was the trade secretary. Soram made a note to fire McGinnis after this all cooled down.
Weighed down as he was in scandal and unpopularity, Soram was looking for some way to redeem himself. He just hadn’t the slightest idea what that might be.
This was Soram’s curse. The scion of a family whose ancestors invented the individually packaged moist towelette (it took two of them, which precipitated an astounding amount of sibling bitterness that ricocheted through the family to this very day), Theodore Logan Preston Soram VI was very rich, occasionally charming in an Old Main Line Family sort of way, and entirely useless in every sort of way except as a cash machine for charities and politicians. For the better part of three decades he’d been on Philadelphia’s “Stations of the Cross”—the stops hopeful senators and presidents made to pick up contributions and unofficial endorsements from the city elite. Soram had wanted to see what it was like on the other side of the table for a change.
So he’d made a deal with Webster: He’d deliver Philadelphia, and Webster would deliver a cabinet position. Soram preferred Trade, as he assumed it would be the best fit since he (well, his broker) had done so well with his international and interplanetary investment portfolios, and even Soram realized that asking for Treasury would be overreaching. But everyone knew it was an extraordinarily tight election, and Webster needed Philly if he was going to get Pennsylvania, a battleground state.
The decision was made: Trade was stocked top to bottom with lifelong bureaucrats. Even after they purged the anti-Nidu elements, there were enough competent people to work around Soram. Soram wasn’t aware that last bit was part of the equation, of course, although the longer he was at Trade the more he suspected he didn’t get listened to as much as he thought he should. But again, he wasn’t quite sure how to go about fixing that. The problem with being fundamentally useless is that it’s difficult to shift gears into being useful. But even Soram was aware it was time to get useful, quick.
And so, when the confidential, encrypted message purporting to come from Ben Javna at State popped into Soram’s mail queue and presented the trade secretary with a shot at redemption, he took it exactly as it was intended: as a gift, and at face value. Had Soram the complexity of mind a position such as his generally required, or even just the healthy paranoia of a career politician, he might have thought to trace the route of the mail, in which he (or more accurately his technical staff) would find that the message was cleverly, subtly but undeniably faked—deep in its routing history was information that showed it originated not from the State Department but from an anonymous remailer in Norway. It had been sent there by a second anonymous remailer in Qatar, which had received it from Archie McClellan, who created it after his communicator discussion with Phipps.
The message was brief:
Se
cretary Soram—
Secretary Heffer wished me to convey to you the following information regarding the Nidu situation.
—here followed a short explanation of who Robin Baker was and why she was important to the Nidu—
After consultation with the President and the Chief of Staff it was decided that it would be best for you to approach the Nidu Ambassador with this information, so as to ameliorate recent difficulties. I have been informed to tell you that time is of the essence and it would be advisable to initiate contact with the Nidu Ambassador without delay after receiving this information.
Soram was yelling for his secretary to get on the horn to the Nidu embassy before he’d even gotten to that last part.
An hour later Soram found himself escorted into the inner sanctum of Narf-win-Getag, Nidu Ambassador to the UNE, enjoying Nidu sarf tea (generally regarded to taste something like cow urine to most humans, who nevertheless never refused when the Nidu insisted on providing every human visitor with a steaming cup of the stuff nearly as soon as they entered the embassy) and sharing sailing stories with the ambassador, whose own yacht, as it happened, was docked at the same marina as Soram’s. Narf-win-Getag was of course delighted to hear about Miss Baker, and assured Soram that upon delivery of the girl for the coronation ceremony, trade negotiations would resume without further delay. Soram invited Narf-win-Getag for a weekend jaunt on his yacht. Narf-win-Getag offered Soram another cup of sarf tea.
On the way back to Trade, Soram had a thought about the press conference he planned to call the next morning, the one in which he declared that the Nidu were coming back to the trade table thanks to his intense lobbying. So he called Jim Heffer’s office. Heffer wasn’t back from his Asia trip—he was always somewhere else, wasn’t he—so he talked to Ben Javna instead.
“Given your help in these discussions with the Nidu, I was wondering if you want anyone from State at the press conference tomorrow,” Soram said.
“Mr. Secretary, I’m afraid I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Javna said.
“I’m holding a press conference to announce that the Nidu are coming back to the negotiating table,” Soram said. “I just got back from talking with the Nidu ambassador. The note you sent me was key in getting them back. I thought you might want to have someone at the conference. I’m scheduling it for nine-fifteen; we’ll get on all the noon shows from that. Come on, Ben! It’ll be fun.”
“Mr. Secretary,” Javna said, in an oddly even tone of voice. “I haven’t sent you any messages in the last week. I certainly haven’t sent any messages to you regarding the Nidu, and if I had, I wouldn’t have suggested you share them with the Nidu.”
“Oh,” Soram said.
“If I may ask, Mr. Secretary, what was in the message?”
“That you’d found the girl they were looking for,” Soram said.
“And what did you tell the ambassador?” Javna asked.
“Well, I told him that we’d be happy to provide the girl to them. You’ve got her, right? Surely she’s agreed to help us.”
“Well, Mr. Secretary, no and no,” Javna said. “As far as I know, we don’t have the girl, and so clearly she can’t have agreed to help us. You’ve just guaranteed something we might not be able to deliver to a nation that already has cause for grievance against us.”
“Oh,” Soram said again. He suddenly felt cold. “Oh, dear.”
“Mr. Secretary, if I may make a suggestion,” Ben Javna said.
“Yes, of course,” Soram said.
“If I were you, I would put off that press conference. I would also send me that note you seem to think I have sent to you. I would also not talk to anyone else about your note, or your visit to the Nidu. Finally, Mr. Secretary, until and unless you hear from me, Secretary Heffer, or President Webster, I’d strongly suggest you not make any long-term plans involving your current office. With all due respect to your position, sir, you’ve just humped the bunk. If you’re lucky, you’ll only have to resign.”
“What happens if I’m not lucky?” Soram asked.
“If you’re not lucky, we’ll all be using cigarettes for currency in the prison exercise yard,” Javna said. “Of course, that’s assuming that after they conquer Earth, the Nidu let us live.”
Javna got off the line with Soram and immediately made the call to Heffer and got Adam Zane, his scheduler, instead. Heffer was just starting his speech lauding the retiring head of the LA office and couldn’t be dragged away for anything short of a full-out attack. Javna briefly considered whether Soram’s stupidity and incompetence constituted a clear and present danger to the Earth, and then told Zane to have Heffer call him the instant he stopped speechifying.
As he disconnected, Javna’s mail queue blinked; Soram’s message had arrived. Javna popped it up and grimaced when he read the message. Whoever had put it together knew as much about the girl as he did, and that of course was very bad. Javna pulled up the routing information; he wasn’t an expert on mailing protocols but he was reasonably sure the UNE State Department was not routing extremely sensitive mail through an anonymous remailer in Norway. Whoever dropped this into Soram’s lap knew that he wasn’t the sort of person who would perform due diligence on the provenance of the message before stampeding off to cover himself in glory and save his own ass. It was someone who knew Soram well, or at least well enough.
Javna had his suspicions, of course. Secretary Pope and his sock puppet Dave Phipps were almost certainly behind this; they had the means and motive to pace Creek step for step in his own investigations. Then there was Defense’s perennially cozy relationship with Jean Schroeder and the American Institute for Colonization. Creek had dug up the connection between Schroeder and that damned fool Dirk Moeller; it was almost equally certain there was a direct connection between Schroeder and either Pope or Phipps, or both. Officially the AIC was in bad odor across the Webster administration, but unofficially people like Schroeder and groups like the AIC were like barnacles on the ship of state. You couldn’t just scrape them off; they had to be blasted off with a fucking water cannon.
Regardless of whom, the question was why. Ideally, Creek would even now be convincing the Baker lady to help out, and State would find some way to have her play her role in the Nidu coronation ceremony so that she walked away from it with no undue trauma. In other words, whoever was playing Soram was only having him deliver a message State would hopefully have delivered a day later at most. If it was sabotage, it didn’t make much sense.
Unless, Javna suddenly realized, whoever fed Soram his information knew that the girl couldn’t be delivered.
Javna checked his watch. By this time, Harry and the Baker lady would be having their little date at the mall. He reached for his desk communicator to call Creek; as he did so his incoming service light went on and Barbara, his assistant, came over the speaker. “The Nidu ambassador is here to see you, Mr Javna,” she said.
Fuck, Javna thought. Just like that, he was out of time.
“Send him in, please,” he said, and then grabbed at his keyboard to bang out a note to Creek. Javna had the dread sense that Creek and the mysterious Miss Baker were about to find themselves in serious and possibly fatal danger. In the short run, until Javna could figure out who was stage-managing this interference and for what end, it was better and safer that Creek and the girl go away.
Javna had no doubt Creek could disappear; he just hoped he’d be able to find to him again when he needed him, which he figured would be all too soon.
Javna banged the “send” key just as the office door opened, and cursed inwardly even as he stood to receive Narf-win-Getag. Having Creek and Baker go to ground was just about the least convenient thing he could have them do at this particular moment in time. Its only advantage was that it was better than the both of them being dead.
Good luck, Harry, Javna thought as he plastered a welcoming smile on his face. Stay safe, wherever you are.
“Where the fuck is he?” Rod Acuna jammed hi
mself through the door of the apartment, Takk following close behind, and stood over Archie at his computer. Archie stared agog at Acuna, who looked like he’d just run a gauntlet of large predators. Acuna whacked Archie hard upside the temple with his good hand. “Where the fuck is Creek?” he repeated.
The smack on the temple got Archie back into work mode. “He’s on the Metro,” Archie said. “I’m tracking him and the girl with the pen. I lose the signal here and there because of the tunnels, but it picks up again when they get near a stop.”
“They’re going to the State Department,” Acuna said.
“I don’t think so,” Archie said, and punched up a map of the Metro system. “Look, here’s the Foggy Bottom/GWU stop,” he said, pointing. Then he pointed at the tracking window, which noted longitude and latitude, updated every second. “These coordinates are past that stop and are moving at speed consistent with a Metro train. They’re still on the Metro.”
“What are they saying to each other?” Acuna asked.
“I’m not picking up anything,” Archie said. “She must have the pen in a purse or something.” Archie looked around again. “Where’s Ed?” he asked.
“Pretty sure he’s dead,” Acuna said. He pointed at the computer screen. “Don’t you lose him, geek. I want to know where that fucker comes out and where he goes next. I’m going to have that son of a bitch dead by sunrise. So don’t you lose him. You get me?”
“I get you,” Archie said. Acuna grunted and hobbled his way over to the bathroom. Archie watched him go and then turned to Takk. “Is Ed really dead?” he asked. Takk shrugged and turned on a game show. Whatever Ed’s professional qualities, it was clear he would not be deeply personally missed by his former colleagues. Archie suspected that if he screwed up finding Creek, he would be even less missed.
Archie turned back to his computer screen, the pen coordinates, and Metro map. Come on, Creek, he thought to himself. Where are you going?
