Shadow Puppets (25 page)

Alai nodded. “So he’s only coding it like this to keep outsiders from understanding it, in case it gets intercepted by an enemy.”

“He doesn’t think anybody here would search his outgoing messages,” said Petra. “Whereas Bean and I know for a fact that we’ve been bugged since we got here.”

“Not terribly successfully,” said Alai with a tight little smile.

“Well, you need better snoopware, to start with,” said Bean.

“And if we had sent a message to Peter,” said Petra, “we would
have told him explicitly to warn our Indian friend not to block the Chinese exit from India, only their return.”

“We would have had no other reason to tell Peter about this at all,” said Bean. “We don’t work for him. We don’t really like him all that much.”

“He’s not,” said Petra firmly, “one of us.”

Alai nodded, sighed, leaned back in his chair. “Please, sit down,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Petra.

Bean walked to the window and looked out over lawns sprinkled by purified water from the Mediterranean. Where the favor of Allah was, the desert blossomed. “I don’t think there’ll be any harm from this,” said Bean. “Aside from our losing a bit of sleep tonight.”

“You must see that it’s hard for me to suspect my closest colleagues here.”

“You’re the Caliph,” said Petra, “but you’re also still a very young man, and they see that. They know your plan is brilliant, they love you, they follow you in all the great things you plan for your people. But when you tell them, Keep this an absolute secret, they say yes, they even mean it, but they don’t take it really quite seriously because, you see, you’re…”

“Still a boy,” said Alai.

“That will fade with time,” said Petra. “You have many years ahead of you. Eventually all these older men will be replaced.”

“By younger men that I trust even less,” said Alai ruefully.

“Telling Peter is not the same thing as telling an enemy,” said Bean. “He shouldn’t have had this information in advance of the invasion. But you notice that the informer didn’t tell him
when
the invasion would start.”

“Yes he did,” said Alai.

“Then I don’t see it,” said Bean.

Petra got up again and looked at the printed-out email. “The message doesn’t say anything about the date of the invasion.”

“It was sent,” said Alai, “on the day of the invasion.”

Bean and Petra looked at each other. “Today?” said Bean.

“The Turkic campaign has already begun,” said Alai. “As soon as it was dark in Xinjiang. By now we have received confirmation via email messages that three airfields and a significant part of the power grid are in our hands. And so far, at least, there is no sign that the Chinese know anything is happening. It’s going better than we could have hoped.”

“It’s begun,” said Bean. “So it was already too late to change the plans for the third front.”

“No, it wasn’t,” said Alai. “Our new orders have been sent. The Indonesian and Arab commanders are very proud to be entrusted with the mission that will take the war home to the enemy.”

Bean was appalled. “But the logistics of it…there’s no time to plan.”

“Bean,” said Alai with amusement. “We already had the plans for a complicated beach landing.
That
was a logistical nightmare. Putting three hundred separate forces ashore at different points on the Chinese coast, under cover of darkness, three days from today, and supporting them with air raids and air drops—my people can do that in their sleep. That was the best thing about your idea, Bean, my friend. It wasn’t a plan at all, it was a situation, and the whole plan is for every individual commander to improvise ways to fulfil the mission objectives. I told them, in my orders, that as long as they keep moving inland, protect their men, and cause maximum annoyance to the Chinese government and military, they can’t fail.”

“It’s begun,” said Petra.

“Yes,” said Bean. “It’s begun, and Achilles is not in China.”

Petra looked at Bean and grinned. “Let’s see what we can do about keeping him away.”

“More to the point,” said Bean. “Since we have
not
given Peter the specific message he needs to convey to Virlomi in India, may we do so now, with your permission?”

Alai squinted at him. “Tomorrow. After news of the fighting in Xinjiang has started to come out. I will tell you when.”

In Uphanad’s office, Graff sat with his feet on the desk as Uphanad worked at the security console.

“Well, sir, that’s it,” said Uphanad. “They’re off.”

“And they’ll arrive when?” said Graff.

“I don’t know,” said Uphanad. “That’s all about trajectories and very complicated equations balancing velocity, mass, speed—I wasn’t the astrophysics teacher in Battle School, you recall.”

“You were small-force tactics, if I remember,” said Graff.

“And when you tried that experiment with military music—having the boys learn to sing together—”

Graff groaned. “Please. Don’t remind me. What a deeply stupid idea that was.”

“But you saw that at once and let us mercifully drop the whole thing.”

“Esprit de corps my ass,” said Graff.

Uphanad hit a group of keys on the console keyboard and the screen showed that he had just logged off. “All done here. I’m glad you found out about the informer here in MinCol. Having the Wiggins leave was the only safe option.”

“Do you remember,” said Graff, “the time I accused you of letting Bean see your log-on?”

“Like yesterday,” said Uphanad. “I don’t think you were going to believe me until Dimak vouched for me and suggested Bean was crawling around the duct system and peeking through vents.”

“Yes, Dimak was sure that you were so methodical you could not possibly have broken your habits in a moment of carelessness. He was right, wasn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Uphanad.

“I learned my lesson,” said Graff. “I trusted you ever since.”

“I hope I have earned that trust.”

“Many times over. I didn’t keep all the faculty from Battle School. Of course, there were some who thought the Ministry of Colonization too tame for their talents. But it isn’t really a matter of personal loyalty, is it?”

“What isn’t, sir?”

“Our loyalty should be to something larger than a particular person, don’t you think? To a cause, perhaps. I’m loyal to the human race—that’s a pretentious one, don’t you think?—but to a particular project, spreading the human genome throughout as many star systems as possible. So our very existence can never be threatened again. And for that, I’d sacrifice many personal loyalties. It makes me completely predictable, but also someone unreliable, if you get what I mean.”

“I think I do, sir.”

“So my question, my good friend, is this: What are you loyal to?”

“To this cause, sir. And to you.”

“This informant who used your log-on. Did he peer at you through the vents again, do you think?”

“Very unlikely, sir. I think it much more probable that he penetrated the system and chose me at random, sir.”

“Yes, of course. But you must understand that because your name was on that email, we had to eliminate you as a possibility first.”

“That is only logical, sir.”

“So as we sent the Wiggins home on the shuttle, we made sure that every member of the permanent staff found out that they were leaving and had every opportunity to send a message. Except you.”

“Except me, sir?”

“I have been with you continuously since they decided to go. That way, if a message was sent, even if it used your log-on, we would know it wasn’t you who sent it. But if a message wasn’t sent, well…it was you who didn’t send it.”

“This is not likely to be foolproof, sir,” said Uphanad. “Someone
else might have
not
sent the message for reasons of his or her own, sir. It might be that their departure was not something for which a message was necessary.”

“True,” said Graff. “But we would not convict you of a crime on the basis of a message not sent. Merely assign you to a less critical responsibility. Or give you the opportunity to resign with pension.”

“That is very kind of you, sir.”

“Please don’t think of
me
as kind, I—”

The door opened. Uphanad turned, obviously surprised. “You can’t come in here,” he said to the Vietnamese woman who stood in the doorway.

“Oh, I invited her,” said Graff. “I don’t think you know Colonel Nguyen of the IF Digital Security Force.”

“No,” said Uphanad, rising to offer his hand. “I didn’t even know your office existed. Per se.”

She ignored his hand and gave a paper to Graff.

“Oh,” he said, not reading it yet. “So we’re in the clear in this room.”

“The message did not use his log-on,” she said.

Graff read the message. It consisted of a single word: “Off.” The log-on was that of one of the orderlies from the docks.

The time in the message header showed it had been sent only a couple of minutes before. “So my friend is in the clear,” said Graff.

“No sir,” said Nguyen.

Uphanad, who had been looking relieved, now seemed baffled. “But I did not send it. How could I?”

Nguyen did not answer him, but spoke only to Graff. “It was sent from this console.”

She walked over to the console and started to log back on.

“Let me do that,” said Uphanad.

She turned around and there was a stun gun in her hand. “Stand against the wall,” she said. “Hands in plain view.”

Graff got up and opened the door. “Come on in,” he said. Two
more IF soldiers entered. “Please inspect Mr. Uphanad for weapons or other lethal items. And under no circumstances is he to be allowed to touch a computer. We wouldn’t want him to activate a program wiping out critical materials.”

“I don’t know how this thing was done,” said Uphanad, “but you’re wrong about me.”

Graff pointed to the console. “Nguyen is never wrong,” he said. “She’s even more methodical than you.”

Uphanad watched. “She’s signing on as me.” And then, “She used my password. That’s illegal!”

Nguyen called Graff over to look at the screen. “Normally, to log off, you press these two keys, you see? But he also pressed
this
one. With his little finger, so you wouldn’t actually notice it had been pressed. That key sequence activated a resident program that sent the email, using a random selection from among the staff identities. It
also
launched the ordinary log-off sequence, so to you, it looked like you had just watched somebody log off in a perfectly normal way.”

“So he had this ready to send at any time,” said Graff.

“But when he
did
send it, it was within five minutes of the actual launch.”

Graff and Nguyen turned around to look at Uphanad. Graff could see in his eyes that he saw he had been caught.

“So,” said Graff, “how did Achilles get to you? You’ve never met him, I don’t think. Surely he didn’t form some attachment with you when he was here for a few days as a student.”

“He has my family,” said Uphanad, and he burst into tears.

“No no,” said Graff. “Control yourself, act like a soldier, we have very little time here in which to correct your failure of judgment. Next time you’ll know, if someone comes to you with a threat like this, you come to me.”

“They said they’d know if I told you.”

“Then you would tell me that, too,” said Graff. “But, now you
have
told me. So let’s make this thing work to our advantage. What happens when you send this second message?”

“I don’t know,” said Uphanad. “It doesn’t matter anyway. She just sent it again. When they get the same message twice, they’ll know something is wrong.”

“Oh, they didn’t get the message either time,” said Graff. “We cut this console off. We cut off the whole station from earthside contact. Just as the shuttle never actually left.”

The door opened yet again, and in came Peter, John Paul, and Theresa.

Uphanad turned his face to the wall. The soldiers would have turned him back around, but Graff gave them a gesture: Let be. He knew how proud Uphanad was. This shame in front of the people he had tried to betray was unbearable. Give him time to compose himself.

Only when the Wiggins were sitting did Graff invite Uphanad also to take a seat. He obeyed, hanging his head like a caricature of a whipped dog.

“Sit up, Uphanad, and face this like a man. These are good people, they understand that you did what you thought you must for your family. You were unwise not to trust me more, but even that is understandable.”

From Theresa’s face, Graff could see that she, at least, was not half so understanding as he seemed to assume. But he won her silence with a gesture.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Graff. “Let’s make this work to our advantage. I actually have a couple of shuttles at my disposal for this operation—compliments of Admiral Chamrajnagar, by the way—so the real quandary is deciding which of them to send when we actually allow your email to go out.”

“Two shuttles?” asked Peter.

“We have to make a guess about what Achilles planned to do with this information. If he means to attack you upon landing, well, we
have a very heavily armed shuttle that should be able to deal with anything he can throw against it from the ground or the air. I think what he’s planning is probably a missile as you’re overflying some region where he can get a portable launch platform.”