Backshot (31 page)

Adams guided Anya to the door, one hand resting gently on her shoulder. “Come and see me anytime you like, Anya, always a pleasure to talk to a professional of your caliber,” the director said. As he spoke his hand slid gently down to the lower part of Anya’s back. “Do come back, Anya.” The hand slid down even farther.

Twenty years of training, experience, dedicated service, concern about the security of the Confederation, her career prospects, all that vanished in a flash of red-hot anger. Anya whirled suddenly, her eyes flashing with indignation and disgust. “I don’t think so!” She gritted in a voice so loud that Adams, a sudden expression of alarm, almost fear on his face, started and stepped back from her. Back in her cubicle Anya sat at her station and tried to calm herself. Her hands were shaking and she was nearly in tears. She took several deep breaths. All right, all right, she told herself, Take it easy! With effort she managed to control her breathing. Cautiously she fingered the crystal in her pocket. The information on that crystal had to get to President Chang-Sturdevant. After a few moments her hands stopped shaking. What to do? Well, first priority was get herself out of the CIO! It was clear to Anya Smiler that she would be persona non grata at Hunter, and the sooner she got out the better it would be for her. Besides, she couldn’t continue working for swine like Adams. Anya had a friend at the Ministry of War. That ministry hated the CIO. She knew what she had to do.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Office of the Deputy Minister for Intelligence, Ministry of War, Fargo, Earth

Anya waited three days before asking for an interview with Adams’s counterpart at the Confederation’s Ministry of War, Jeremy Boast, Marcus Berentus’s Deputy Minister for Intelligence. Anya had known Boast (“J. B.” to everyone in the intelligence community) for some years and he had frequently tried to entice her away from the CIO. She had politely declined those offers, but the seed had been planted. When she asked for an appointment it had been granted immediately.

“Come to spy on us, Anya?” Boast asked, laughing, as she was ushered into his office. She could not help contrasting J. B.’s office with Adams’s. The furniture consisted of old-fashioned straight-backed padded chairs and plain tables. On one wall hung an artist’s rendition of the Battle of New Reading that had taken place in 2253, where an understrength Marine infantry division had succeeded in holding off an entire army trying to force a strategic pass in the Gondular Mountains. The action was known as “New Thermopylae,” only with a happy ending. On the opposite wall hung a very old painting depicting Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn. “The Alpha and Omega of military tactics,” Boast was fond of remarking. On the wall directly behind his desk—a massive affair made of real wood with a polished top covered by a huge piece of glass—hung his military award certificates engraved on vellum and trid images of Boast’s career as a Marine intelligence officer. “I’m a double-dipper,” he’d tell visitors, meaning he was drawing both his military pension and a civil service salary. Boast himself was in his early nineties, spare, energetic, a man who never minced words. The office décor matched his personality perfectly. As soon as Anya entered the place she knew she would be taken seriously there.

“Sassi?” Boast asked. Sassi was a popular soft drink. Anya, who for the past several days had spent too much time communing with a bottle of bourbon, accepted gratefully. Boast served her himself from a cooler that sat in one corner of the office.

“Are you still on the Atlas desk?”

“Until a few weeks ago, sir.”

“Promoted?”

“Yes, kicked upstairs, so I quit that fucking disaster, sir,” she said bitterly.

“Umm. I see. What you been up to these past weeks, then?”

“Spending too much of it getting drunk, sir, washing my cares away,” she said lightly.

“That’s an honorable enough pastime, Anya, I used to do a bit of that myself.” Anya could not possibly imagine J. Murchison Adams drunk.

“You don’t by any chance have an ortho-sofa, do you, sir?”

“What?” Boast laughed, imagining one of the monstrous devices in his Spartan surroundings. “No, I don’t trust the hedonistic things, Annie. We had a senator squashed to death in one of them a while back. Maybe you heard about it? I don’t trust anything I can’t install and fix myself. All those outrageous technicians, they’re becoming the new priesthood, know what I mean?” He handed her the Sassi, which he expected her to drink right out of the bottle. “Besides,” he continued, sitting behind his desk and putting his feet up, “those damned conveniences make a man—or a woman—soft, too comfortable, takes the edge off.” He drank from his bottle of Sassi. “I have a job opening, if that’s why you’re here, Anya.”

“Nossir, that is not why I’m here.” She took the crystal out of her pocket and held it up. “I have this, and I’d like you to read it and tell me what I should do with it. Uh,” she looked around, “you do have a reader, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he laughed, “some of this razzle-dazzle technology really is worthwhile.” He pressed a button and a tiny reader emerged on a platform from somewhere under his desk. Anya laughed as she handed over the small plastic container; most people at his level had desks that could morph consoles out of their tops.

“What’s in here?” Boast asked, holding up the container.

“A lab report on the analyses of the material brought back from Atlas, sir, and other information about what the CIO is up to on Atlas.”

Boast regarded the crystal in its little box. “You know you could get fired if anybody over there at Hunter knew you were sharing this stuff with me? Hell, girl, you could even face criminal prosecution for giving this to me!”

Anya sighed and her shoulders slumped. “Frankly, sir, I just don’t give a damn. Besides, they can’t fire me, I already resigned.”

“Um. Well, if this is of any use to us, we’ll give you a medal. I’ve got a whole box of them over there.”

Boast inserted the crystal and pressed a button. What popped up on his screen kept him engrossed for about twenty minutes. Finally he closed his eyes as if getting control of himself. “Anya, come here, around behind me, so you can see this screen.” A questioning look on her face, Anya complied. “I want you to read this. It’s an Ultra Secret backchannel message from J. Murchison Adams to President Chang-Sturdevant. She in turn shared it with Minister Berentus and he with me. Read what it says.” He exited the crystal report and entered a password. Anya took in her breath as a short message popped up on the screen. She read:

ULTRA SECRET FLASH

EYES ONLY, CHANG-STURDEVANT

LAB ANALYSES REVEAL LAVAGER BUILDING A “PLANET-BUSTING” NUCLEAR DEVICE. PRECISE TRIGGERING AND DELIVERY SYSTEM UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME BUT UNDER STUDY.

ESTIMATED YIELD BASED ON ANALYSIS OF SAMPLES RECOVERED FROM LABS ON ATLAS @ 1,000 (ONE THOUSAND) MEGATONS PLUS. URGENTLY RECOMMEND SPECIAL TEAM IN PLACE @ NEW GRANUM BE GIVEN CLEARANCE TO PROCEED IMMEDIATELY.

ADAMS.

EXCLUDED FROM AUTOMATIC DOWNGRADING

PER ADAMS

ULTRA SECRET

“This is all lies!” Anya shouted. “This is not what Dr. O’Bygne’s team discovered! We have to stop this!”

Boast sighed. “Look in the header, Anya. It was dated last week.”

“Last week!” Anya exclaimed.

“Please sit down, Anya.” He got up and guided her back to her chair. “We can’t stop this, Anya. It’s too late. Lavager is dead.”

Anya’s body went rigid. The word “No” formed on her lips but when she tried to say it only air came out. “My—” she gasped, “my fault,” she whispered. She mumbled something ending in “sooner.”

“I don’t think it would’ve done any good, Anya,” Boast whispered, laying a hand on her shoulder. Anya’s grief turned instantly to white-hot anger. “Goddamn you! Goddamn all you meddling, power-hungry motherfucking bastards! Goddamn you!” she shouted, half rising out of her chair and banging her fists on its arms as she screamed curses at Boast and through him at the entire Confederation government.

Boast bowed his head silently and let Anya rage on.

“Sir? Sir? Is everything all right?” Boast’s secretary asked over the intercom. She had heard Anya cursing and screaming through the wall.

“Yes, Judie, everything’s all right. Would you get Marcus for me? Tell him I’ve got to see him at once?”

“He’s in a conference with the Chief of Staff, sir. He’s told us to hold all calls until he says otherwise.”

“Judie, you get his goddamned secretary right now and tell him to tell Marcus that I’m on my way to his office, and I’m bringing someone with me who has something he’s got to know about right away.” He turned back to Anya. “Anya, you’re right, we are a bunch of meddling, power-hungry idiots and worse, much worse. But by God, somebody’s going pay for this mess, I swear, Annie, I swear it.”

Anya Smiler’s anger turned as suddenly to grief and she began to weep in long, wracking sobs, like a person whose heart has been broken. Hers had.

“Annie, will you come with me to see Marcus Berentus, and then the President? Can you do that? Are you up to it?” He took her gently by the shoulders to steady her shaking. Anya caught her breath and wiped her eyes. They were bright blue, Boast noted. “Yessir, I will. Goddamned right I will!”

Office of the Minister of War

“What have we done, what have we done?” Marcus Berentus muttered after viewing the crystal Jeremy Boast had given him. As he read his face had gone white and then turned red with anger. “This is nothing but catastrophic!”

Berentus’s office, like Boast’s, was Spartan, if slightly larger than his intelligence chief’s. He often hosted private conferences there, so along one wall was a long table equipped with individual viewers for participants. But Berentus had invited Boast and Anya to sit at a small coffee table arrangement where they could talk more intimately. “I ought to kill that bastard,” Berentus said of J. Murchison Adams.

“Anya, I guarantee you, nothing shall happen to you for blowing the whistle on the people at Hunter.”

“I know that, sir. Mr. Boast promised me the same and I know I can trust you.”

“You’re absolutely right that you can. And the reason I can say that is because when the President sees what I’ve just read, J. Murchison Adams and that whole crew he’s installed over there will be out on their pinstriped asses! You can work here for us from now on. I’ll match the grade they gave you at CIO.”

“Thank you, sir, but I’d like to think about it for a while, if you don’t mind. Right now I’m just—well, I need some time off. And—and if the President is going to clean things up over at CIO, well, maybe I can go back to my old job?”

“I understand, Anya. Think about my offer.” He sighed and shook his head. “What was this man, Lavager, really like, Anya?”

Anya felt tears coming to her eyes again. She struggled to get a grip on herself. “He was a fine man, sir. Anybody could sit down and talk with him. He treated everyone the same. He was direct, open, and honest with everyone. And he enjoyed life, more than anyone I’ve ever known.” In her imagination she could smell the rich aroma of Lavager’s Anniversarios again. For the rest of her life the smell of cigar smoke would remind her of the man. She struggled again to control her emotions. She focused for a moment on a holograph image on one wall of Marcus Berentus standing beside what looked like a fighter aircraft, a huge grin on his youthful face. He was pointing to several large holes in the fuselage of the fighter. Anya thought, Lavager would have liked these men. “He was no dictator, sir,” she concluded.

“We played God and came up short,” Jeremy Boast said.

“Sir, what happened to his daughter, Candace?” Anya asked suddenly.

“She’s fine. She’ll be going to an off-world university, Anya. I’ll see to it that she’ll be looked out for from now on. She’s got a future.” He paused and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “I don’t need an appointment to see the President.” He got to his feet. “Anya, will you come with me to see Madam President?” He held out his hand to help her up.

“Yessir, I will.”

Anya smiled on her way home after meeting the President—such a gracious woman. Maybe Anya would call Tim tonight, try to patch things up . . .

EPILOGUE

“I’m drunk,” Madam Chang-Sturdevant said with drunken gravity. “And I don’t give a damn.” She lay stretched out on the old-fashioned leather couch in her private office, a glass of bourbon in one hand and a smoldering Davidoff Ambassadrice Senorita in the other. She drew on the cigar and slowly exhaled the aromatic smoke.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say you’re ‘drunk,’ Suelee,” Marcus Berentus said. He sat enfolded in an overstuffed armchair, his own drink in one hand and an Anniversario in the other. Nobody in government had ever called Madam President Suelee except, recently, for Marcus, and then only in private, intimate situations, such as the one they were in now.

“Oh, yeah?”

“Just a little lit, Suelee. You deserve it, after what we’ve just been through.”

Suelee drew again on the cigarillo, sucked the smoke deep into her lungs and expelled it slowly through her nose. She sipped at the bourbon. “After what we’ve been through, Marcus?” she asked bitterly.

“Don’t you mean after what we’ve put the people on Atlas through, not to mention that poor man, Lavager? We made his daughter an orphan, Marcus. No, correction! I did all that, me, the fucking President of the fucking Confederation of Human-fucking-Worlds. I did all that.” She finished her drink in one gulp. “Marcus, would you be a perfect dear and plour, pour me another?” She held out her glass.

“Suelee, you’ve been in politics all your life,” Berentus said over his shoulder as he refilled Chang-Sturdevant’s glass, “and you know that even the best leaders are only as good as the advice they’re given. You got bad advice that you thought was reliable and you acted on it.” He handed her the glass. Yes, there were some new lines in that still-handsome face, and maybe another strand or two of gray hair on her head, but Cynthia Chang-Sturdevant still turned heads when she walked into a room.

“Oh, bullshit, Marcus! Pure bullshit! Don’t try to soften the blow! I made the decision, I gave the orders, the disaster on Atlas is all on my shoulders, nobody else’s.”

“We’ve sent people to Atlas to help out with this crop disaster. Lavager’s scientists never did discover that stabilizing element, but we have our best people working on it. And I’ve personally seen to it that Lavager’s daughter is taken care of. The Smiler woman is now on my staff, Suelee. Nothing will happen to her now.”

“I find myself wishing she’d never come to us, Marcus. Ignorance is such bliss.”

“Suelee, this is all the fault of Adams and that crowd—”

“Screw them! I can’t put what happened off on them! I should have known, I shouldn’t have trusted him! I knew he had his own agenda. I should have replaced him months ago, ordered a reorganization of the CIO top to bottom. By Christ, that’s what’s going to happen now—he’s going to resign and the whole mess’ll be swept under the rug.” She smiled bitterly and sipped her drink. “We can’t have my administration embarrassed by any of this, can we? And while all this was shaping up all I did was sit here on my ass and do nothing.” She made a gesture of frustration with her cigar. “Marcus, those Marines who went to Atlas and did the dirty deed on my direction. They are never to be told the truth about the mission, about how they committed murder and half destroyed an entire world’s economy because of someone’s lying personal agenda, and because of my rank stupidity.”

“To the best of my ability, they will never know. Though, Suelee, if they learn on their own about the crop damage, they’re smart enough to figure out at least part of it for themselves.”

She sighed deeply. “I know,” she said in a small voice. They were silent for several moments, then she sat upright, put her glass on a sideboard and her cigar into an ashtray.

“Marcus, I’ve come to a decision. I am not running for reelection.”

“What? Suelee, you can’t be serious!” Marcus leaned forward in his armchair. The leather squeaked pleasantly as he shifted his weight.

“Yes I am. I’m tired of other people’s problems, Marcus. I’m tired of running other people’s lives, too. I’m tired of being polite to other politicians, of begging the Senate to do what any decent person would do. And most of all, I am tired, I am sick, of sending other people to their deaths.” She held up a hand.

“Do not argue with me, Marcus.” She was not drunk now and her voice carried steely determination as she spoke. “I’ve made up my mind.” She sat back on the couch and sighed. “It’s the price I have to pay.” She sat silently for a long moment, then, “Marcus, I think I shall have a cry.”

Berentus moved quickly to her side and put his arm around her. She lay her head against his. He ran a hand through her hair. It smelled of aromatic cigar smoke and lotus blossoms. People referred to Chang-Sturdevant as “The Iron Lady,” “The Dragon Lady,” and so on, the sobriquets normally applied to a woman of power, but to Marcus Berentus she was a soft and warmly human person and when he was close to her, like now, he imagined warm summer nights in a fragrant Chinese garden. “Marcus, when I’m no longer President, when I’m retired and a lonely old maid again, will you still love me?”

“You bet, more than ever! If you go, I go, and wherever you go, that’s where I’ll be.” He kissed her forehead and smiled. He didn’t know if she had heard him. She was fast asleep. There was something Marcus Berentus would never tell the handsome woman sleeping on the couch. He’d already told the whole sorry tale to Hugyens Long. If he knew the Attorney General, one day, not too far in the future, when J. Murchison Adams was out of the public eye, he would quietly vanish, along with his deputy Palmer Quincy Lowell, and never be seen again—except by the other denizens of Darkside.

Annie Hall, the former Presidential Residence, outside New Granum, Atlas

“Ladies, hurry with your packing,” Franklin al-Rashid said from the doorway, “your flight leaves in an hour. It’s a wonderful morning, just right for a drive into town. I’ll be outside when you’re ready.”

The heavy luggage had already been sent ahead, but neither girl had much to take with her. Candace was leaving Annie Hall forever. Soon the next president and his family would move in—the government of the Union of Margelan had leased it from the Lavager estate. All of the Lavager possessions, the accumulations of lifetimes, had been put in storage and Candace would take with her only the things she’d need on the long journey to university. She planned to major in political science as an undergraduate and then law. She would return to Atlas. Her father’s name would carry her far in Margelan politics, and she would achieve the unification of Atlas her father had only dreamed of. That was her plan, anyway.

“We’re both orphans now, adrift in the cold, cruel world,” Gina Medina remarked and smiled. She hefted the little bag of toiletries she was taking with her. She would major in agronomy and someday return to Atlas and her family’s farm. It had no mortgage and her parents’ insurance was enough to pay the taxes until she could finish her education and get the place running again.

“Actually, I’m excited, Gina. We’re going far, far away from here, and we’ll be friends now for the rest of our lives! Just think, we can get a room together at the university.” An endowment had been established for the two young women, neither knew by whom, to pay for their education and get them started in their lives. Candace assumed the money came from friends of her father. The lawyer who managed the funds would not tell either girl how the trust was financed.

“Well, I’m going down now, Candace,” Gina announced, “I want to get a good seat in the car. And say good-bye to Roland for me.”

Candace Lavager picked up her bag and walked slowly out onto the landing at the head of the staircase. For as long as she could remember, she had lived in Annie Hall. The smell of her father’s cigars was still prevalent everywhere and even though she’d pretended not to like them, she loved their aroma; all the rest of her life cigar smoke would remind her of him. She loved this old house, the floorboards beneath her feet; every inch of the place was somehow a part of her. She looked down the stairs and remembered the time as a little girl she’d slid down the banister and cracked her head on the floor at the bottom. The house was quiet now. She stood there listening intently. In her own mind she could hear the voices of her parents, her mother’s, soft and tender, her father’s rich tenor. She would never hear them again. “Mommy, Daddy,” she whispered, “I’ll always love you.” She walked down the stairs, out into the sunshine and the rest of her life.

The Queen of Killers

First sniper team’s Bella Dwan broke formation and came to stand one pace to Athon’s left. She showed her teeth to the Marines of second platoon in a grin. Her grin was no more friendly than that of a hungry shark.

“Lance Corporal Dwan,” Athon said to second platoon, “will explain to you the operation and capabilities of the M14A5 sniper maser. She won’t go into any great detail about how it functions; none of you have the advanced degrees in physics you’d need to understand them.

“Lance Corporal.” He stepped aside. Bella Dwan was petite and had what on another woman might be called an elfin face—as long as one didn’t look into her eyes. They were cold and hard, and had made many a strong man excuse himself and depart for other environs. They called her the “Queen of Killers.”