"Are you sure about this, Victor?" asked Jeremy. "It's a hell of risky way for you to try to get onto Mesa."
He gave Victor's companion a glance that was not quite skeptical, but close. "And—meaning no offense, Yana—but adding you to this small team seems to me to increase the risk, not lower it."
The ex-Scrag Amazon gave the war secretary a cool smile in return. A bit hastily, he added: "Not because I doubt your loyalties, you understand. It's just . . ."
He chuckled softly. "I will say, Victor, if you pull this off you'll have raised the bar for chutzpah about a meter."
"Who Hutspa?" asked Berry.
"Miguel Jutspa," said Ruth. "Spelled with a 'J,' not an 'H.' He's a leader of the Renaissance League, one of Jessica Stein's close advisers."
Web Du Havel smiled. "I think Anton's actually using a Yiddish term, Ruth."
"What's—"
"Ancient dialect of German used by Jews. 'Chutzpah'—it actually starts with a 'ch'—means . . ." His eyes got a little unfocused. "There's no exact translation. It's a wonderful term, really. The closest would be brazen, brash—but with the connotation of breathtaking self-righteousness as well. A good illustration is the old joke about the man who murdered his parents for the inheritance and then, when caught and convicted, argued that he should get a light sentence because he'd been deprived of parental guidance. That's chutzpah."
Berry looked back and forth between Victor and Yana. "All right, I can see that. Victor and Yana go in as a couple, pretending to be among the very few survivors of the Manpower Incident on Terra—the only StateSec agent and one of the few Scrags who somehow managed to keep from getting slaughtered by the murderous alliance between the Ballroom, Kevin Usher—now the head of Haven's FIS—and a certain then-completely-unknown StateSec agent by the name of . . . Victor Cachat."
"Look at it this way," said Victor. "If anybody presses me, I can give them details about the episode that they've never heard, but which will ring absolutely true."
Anton laughed softly. "Since, in fact, there were no survivors of that StateSec unit—except you." He looked at Yana. "And it's almost certain that no one has an exact record of exactly which Scrags were killed in Chicago. Some did survive, after all. So why not you?"
Ruth looked a bit uncertain. "I don't know . . . It would seem to me that there's a risk there. If there were so few Scrag survivors of that incident—and there aren't all that many Scrags in the universe to begin with—isn't there a chance that one of the real survivors will know that Yana wasn't among them? Of course, that's assuming she runs into any such on Mesa, which is probably not likely. Still, it's a risk."
Yana shook her head. "You don't really understand how Scrag society works, Ruth. The level of what you might call internal belligerence is closer to that of predators than humans. It wouldn't be at all surprising if I'd gotten irritated with other Scrags and gone my own way. And, as it happens, I did spend a fair amount of time on Terra in my younger days, most of it in Chicago. A lot of Scrags do, though, so I'd hardly stand out."
She looked at Berry. And, for an instant, might have seemed a tiny bit embarrassed. "I even—just for a short time—had a fling with one of the Scrags who was involved—several years later, you understand, I was long gone by then—in your sister's kidnapping."
Berry put her hand over her mouth, stifling laughter. "Wait'll I tell Helen!"
"I'd just as soon you didn't. No reason to bother, anyway. That particular ex-boyfriend ranks close to the bottom on my long list of ex-boyfriends whose memory I hold in cheerful contempt."
She bestowed an approving look upon Victor. "Not that I'm holding a grudge, seeing as how Victor eventually blew the bastard apart with a flechette gun."
Victor smiled politely in return, the way someone smiles when they're thanked for having done a minor favor in times past. Held open a door in the rain, lent someone a small amount of money, butchered an ex-lover, that sort of thing.
"To get back to the point," he said, "unless someone very high up in Mesan security gets involved, there's really not much chance that anyone will see through the charade. In the nature of things, StateSec saw to it that there were no records of me readily available. No vids, no images, no DNA records, nothing. They were methodical about that to the point of mania, especially during the Saint-Just years. So unless I meet someone on Mesa who actually worked with me in StateSec, I'm not running that much risk. And the chance of that happening is quite low, because . . . well . . ."
"You didn't leave too many survivors," said Ruth sweetly.
"That's one way of putting it, I suppose."
Berry had been frowning. "Victor, what did you mean when you said 'unless someone very high up in Mesan security gets involved'?"
They'd been meeting, as usual, in the deeply-buried operations chamber which now also served as Berry and Ruth's living quarters. Looking at his adopted daughter, Anton had to suppress an urge to grin for perhaps the tenth time since the meeting had started. There was something just plain comical about the very young Queen of Torch officially presiding over a meeting . . . while sitting in a lotus position on top of her bed.
There wasn't much choice, though. The addition of Saburo and now Yana to the inner circle had crowded the seats at the conference table to the point where both Ruth and Berry found it more comfortable to perch on their beds—which wasn't hard, of course, since the beds were jammed up against the table.
As the operations center for which it had been designed, the buried chamber had seemed perfectly roomy. Now that it had to double much of the time as the effective seat of a planet's government, it no longer did.
"What he means," said Anton, "is that we have to assume that even given the incredibly low profile Victor's maintained over the years, Manpower—or whoever's really running the show on Mesa—will by now have gotten enough to be able to identify him. If one of their own top agents spots him. But the odds that they've spread that information widely, even among their own ranks, is low."
"Why?" asked Ruth. "I'd think that's the first thing they'd do."
Thandi Palane smiled, and shook her head. "That's because you've been an individualist your whole life, Ruth—even when your membership in the Winton dynasty enabled you to shoehorn yourself into a central position as an official spy."
Ruth frowned. "Which means . . . what?"
"It means you've had no experience with bureaucracies from the inside out," said Jeremy. "Neither had I, of course"—here he gave Web Du Havel a sour look—"until this inveterate paper-pusher finagled me into accepting a position in his administration. But I know the dynamic, since I often manipulated it myself to good effect. Any bureaucrat, especially a bureaucrat in a security or espionage agency, has what amounts to an automatic reflex to keep things a secret. That's because 'being in the know' is the currency by which such stalwarts trade favors and influence—and thereby their own advancement."
Ruth looked dubious. So did Berry. But both Anton and Victor were nodding their agreement.
"He's right, Ruth. Trust me on this—since I'm the one risking my life, after all."
"And mine," piped up Yana. "But I trust you completely. Sweetheart."
Thandi seemed to choke. The look she gave Yana was one part warning, and ten parts simple amusement.
Even the one part warning, Anton knew, was just a sort of subconscious reflex. He was sure that Palane wasn't really worried about Victor "straying" while he spent weeks or possibly even months in Yana's close company, even sharing a bed with her.
With another man, she might have worried. But one of Victor's cover stories for years had been the pretense he and Ginny Usher had put up of being secret lovers, cuckolding Ginny's older and foolish husband Kevin. They'd used that disguise often and sometimes for long stretches, and almost always shared the same bed.
Yana was an attractive enough woman, to be sure. But she wasn't remotely close to Ginny Usher, when it came to sheer beauty and sexiness. That was hardly surprising, since Yana's genome had been designed to be that of a soldier and Ginny's had been manipulated to be that of a pleasure slave. If Victor could manage to spend months in bed with Ginny Usher and do nothing, Thandi would be quite confident he could manage the same with Yana. The man's self-control bordered on the inhuman.
Except when it came to being teased by women. In that quirky area of the human psyche, Victor was often still as vulnerable as he'd been at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Anton had to suppress another urge to grin, seeing the way Victor actually flushed at Yana's wisecrack.
Hastily, Cachat pressed on. "The very fact that it's so hard to dig up anything on me means that if Mesa managed it—and we have to assume they did—the information will be kept tightly restricted to the upper echelons of their security forces. At least, until such time as they have reason to think I belong on their front burner—and I can't see any reason they'd do so. Not yet, anyway. Beyond that . . ."
He and Zilwicki exchanged glances. "This is something I've discussed extensively with Anton. Mesan society, no matter how tightly organized and no matter what secret cabal might actually be running the show, has got to have a huge and filthy underbelly. There's simply no way a society can operate on such brutal and elitist premises for so many centuries without creating such an underbelly—which it's very likely even Mesa's elite doesn't really know that much about. Partly because they can't, and partly because they don't want to."
Ruth still looked dubious. Berry, on the other hand, looked to Du Havel. She understood, better than Ruth did, that the truth when it came to such matters was more often found in historical patterns than in the minutiae of intelligence work.
"I agree with them," said Web. "In fact, if we had the time and you knew the math involved, I could demonstrate that Victor and Anton's assessment is certainly correct. The only real variable, in fact, is simply how correct it is. To put it another way, how big and how filthy is that underbelly? But that the underbelly will exist at all, is a given."
Seeing Ruth's still-skeptical expression, he added: "And I could positively bury you under a mountain of historical analogies. As an example, one of the two societies in history which originally produced the term 'totalitarian' was the ancient Soviet Union. When it collapsed, not much more than a century before the Diaspora, it didn't take long at all for a highly-developed and very powerful gangster sub-culture to emerge. For a time, in fact, many analysts referred to the new government as a kleptocracy. The point being, that beneath the apparent surface—as hard and tightly policed as any in history—a very thuggish society had been gestating and developing."
He looked now at Victor and Anton, who were seated next to each other. "And that's what they're counting on. Anton as well as Victor, although his chosen entry route is a lot less flamboyant." Here, he smiled. "As you might expect. But both of them are counting on finding plenty of rot and corruption once they arrive on Mesa."
"In my case, simple greed," said Anton. He gestured with a thumb at Victor. "In his case, he's counting on the fact—fine, the assumption—that while Manpower has been using a lot of mercenaries, including StateSec renegades, they will almost certainly be keeping an arm's distance from them. They'll especially be keeping an arm's distance from the StateSec renegades, even the ones on Mesa itself. Which they can do because they're using the mercenary outfits as their 'cut-outs.' "
"Especially the ones on Mesa," said Victor. "We already discussed, yesterday, the information Rozsak's intelligence officer Watanapongse passed onto us. They're almost certain—and we agreed with that assessment—that Mesa is planning to launch a massive attack on Torch in the near future using mostly StateSec renegades as the shock troops. And that they're most likely planning to violate the Eridani Edict."
"Ah." The frown on Ruth's forehead cleared away. "Which means Mesa is going to want as much plausible deniability as possible when it comes to those StateSec renegades—including the ones on their own planet."
Victor nodded. "My guess, in fact, is that shortly before the attack happens, Mesa will launch a major purge of those StateSec people still on the planet. A few will be rounded up in case show trials are needed, but most of them—and certainly any who know anything—will be shot while resisting arrest or shot while attempting to escape or accidentally killed by a freak meteor strike."
"Don't forget lightning bolts and—a perennial favorite—air car accidents," added Anton cynically. "There'll be a rash of suicides, too, driven by remorse, and a statistically improbable number of drownings and accidental drug overdoses."
"In short," resumed Victor, "all Yana and I have to do is get past Mesan customs—easy enough, with our cover story—and then we can disappear into the mercenary underworld on Mesa. We'll have to get out before the hammer comes down, of course, but that's a given anyway."
"I'll be using more conventional means," said Anton. "A shady trade delegation, basically, whom everyone will assume is really there to develop some contacts with seccy sutlers. Which is another murky underworld, and one which"—he nodded to Saburo—"the Ballroom can provide me entry into."
He looked around the table. "And . . . that's the gist of it. I'm not going into the specific details, of course. There's no reason to."
"How soon do you plan to leave?" asked Ruth.
"I'll be leaving tomorrow," said Cachat. "Anton, in about a week."
Palane's face got pinched. This was probably the first she'd heard of Victor's specific timetable. The man could take "need to know" to extreme lengths, sometimes. That might be excellent secret agent practice—but it was also guaranteed to cause some harsh words being spoken once Thandi got him in private.
"How will you arrange to meet each other after you've gotten there?" asked Du Havel. Then he held up his hand. "Sorry, I don't really need to know that. I'm just curious."
Anton shrugged. "We couldn't tell you anyway, since we haven't figured it out ourselves. And won't. I'm just leaving it to Victor to find me. That's because while his cover story is riskier than mine, it has the advantage of giving him greater freedom of movement if it works. A lot of this is stuff we'll jury-rig as we go along."
A number of frowns appeared.
"Relax," said Victor. "We really are very good at this."
* * *
The next morning, after discussing a few last moment details, Victor said: "You'll let Harrington know, I assume."
"Yes. But not until I leave."
Victor nodded. "All right, then. I'll see you on Mesa, Anton. Yana, let's be off."
And off they went. As unsentimental partings went, this one couldn't have been improved upon by any creatures on their side of a spinal cord. It would have done crustaceans proud.
"Damn. You guys really are good," said Ruth.