"I-" Elizabeth began. Then she paused, obviously beginning to think at last.
"All right," she said, after a moment. "I'll grant that that's a legitimate question. But what about the credit transfers the Solly police turned up?"
"Ah, yes," White Haven said. "The credit transfers. Transfers made directly out of Havenite diplomatic funds, and made so clumsily the police turned them up within less than seven hours of beginning their investigation of the killer. And let's not forget, that killer was on what anyone but an idiot must have recognized would be a suicide mission. Like the reports say, there were police eyewitnesses. At the very least, he was looking at certain arrest and conviction for murder. Would you do that for seventy-five thousand dollars? How much good would the money do you lying dead on the sidewalk, or after it was confiscated by the courts when they convicted and sentenced you for murder?"
"Maybe it's a double-blind," Colonel Ellen Shemais suggested.
The head of Elizabeth's personal security detachment's job was at least half that of a spook. As a consequence, Elizabeth had made the colonel her liaison to the Special Intelligence Service, as well as her chief bodyguard.
"What do you mean, Ellen?" the Queen asked now.
"I mean Earl White Haven's objections are extremely well taken, Your Majesty," Shemais said. "It's got to be the stupidest way to arrange an ostensibly deniable assassination I've ever heard of, and the Queen's Own is something of an authority on the history of assassination. They might as well have had their ambassador pull the trigger himself. So, either they didn't do it, and someone's gone to enormous lengths to convince us they did, or else they deliberately set it up this way so they could scream they were being framed."
"Why would they do that, Colonel?" Baron Grantville asked.
"I don't know. The problem is, they could have a reason we simply don't know anything about that makes it seem perfectly logical to them. I can't personally conceive of what it might be, but it's the only explanation I can come up with for them to have set this up."
"What about the time element?" Langtry asked. "What if this was something they'd decided simply had to be done quickly, and they didn't have time to set it up better?"
"Won't wash, Mr. Secretary," Shemais said, shaking her head. "The earliest of those credit transfers was over three months old. So either they had a limousine driver-someone who was driving their own limousines, not someone else's-on their payroll for three months and then tapped him for this suicide mission, as the Earl described it, or else we were supposed to find the transfers. And if they recruited him specifically to kill Admiral Webster, then apparently they did it three months ago. Which was plenty of time for them to have set up another assassin, one with absolutely no connection to them, instead."
"But who else could have wanted Jim dead?" Grantville asked.
"I can't answer that one, either, Prime Minister," Shemais admitted candidly. "But while you're asking it, you might also want to ask who else could have wanted him dead, and had the resources and technical capability to put this together, if it wasn't the Peeps? If it wasn't them, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to convince us it was."
"I don't think it was anyone else," Elizabeth growled. She was marginally less furious, and Ariel allowed her to lift him from the sadly shredded topof her chair as she seated herself at last. She settled the 'cat in her lap, and frowned harshly.
"I'm willing to admit at least the theoretical possibility that it wasn't the Peeps," she said, "but I don't believe it was someone else. I think it was them. I think they did it for some reason we can't know, possibly something Webster had found out on Old Earth that they didn't want us to learn about. Maybe even something he hadn't realized yet that he knew. Like you say, Ellen, we can't know what might have seemed like a logical reason to them. And as for the credit transfers, they could have had him doing something else before they picked him for this one."
"But-" Hamish began, only to have her cut him off with a quick, sharp shake of her head.
"No," she said. "I'm not going to play the think and double-think game. For now-for the moment-I'll operate on the assumption that it may not have been the Peeps. You've got that much. We'll go ahead with the summit, and we'll see what they have to say. I'd be lying if I said what's happened wasn't likely to make me a lot less willing to believe anything they say on Torch, but I'll go. But I'm getting incredibly tired of having these bastards murder people I care about, members of my government, and my ambassadors. This is it, as far as I'm willing to go."
Anthony Langtry looked as if he wanted to argue, but instead, he only closed his mouth and nodded, willing to settle for what he could get.
Elizabeth glared around the conference room one more time, then climbed back out of her damaged chair, nodded to her three cabinet secretaries, and left, accompanied by Colonel Shemais.
Chapter Fifty-One
"Where's Ruth?" Berry Zilwicki, Queen of Torch, asked plaintively.
"Saburo says she's running late, girl," Lara said, shrugging with the casual informality which was such a quintessential part of her.
The ex-Scrag was still about as civilized as a wolf, and she had a few problems grasping the finer points of court etiquette. Which, to tell the truth, suited Berry just fine. Usually, at least.
"If I've got to do this," the Queen said firmly, "Ruth has to do it with me."
"Berry," Lara said, "Kaja said she'll be here, and Saburo and Ruth are already on their way. We can go ahead and start."
"No." Berry flounced-that really was the only verb that fit-over to an armchair and plunked down in it. "I'm the Queen," she said snippily, "and I want my intelligence advisor there when I talk to these people."
"But your father isn't even on Torch," Lara pointed out with a grin. Thandi Palane's "Amazons" had actually developed senses of humor, and all of them were deeply fond of their commander's "little sister." Which was why they took such pleasure in teasing her.
"You know what I mean!" Berry shot back, rolling her eyes in exasperation. But there was a twinkle in those eyes, and Lara chuckled as she saw it.
"Yes," she admitted. "But tell me, why do you need Ruth? It's only a gaggle of merchants and businessmen." She wrinkled her nose in the tolerant contempt of a wolf for the sheep a bountiful nature had created solely to feed it. "Nothing to worry about in that bunch, girl!"
"Except for the fact that I might screw up and sell them Torch for a handful of glass beads!"
Lara looked at her, obviously puzzled, and Berry sighed. Lara and the other Amazons truly were trying hard, but it was going to take years to even begin closing the myriad gaps in their social skills and general background knowledge.
"Never mind, Lara," the teenaged Queen said after a moment. "It wasn't really all that funny a joke, anyway. But what I meant is that with Web tied up with Governor Barregos' representative, I need someone a little more devious to help hold my hand when I slip into the shark tank with these people. I need someone to advise me about what they really want, not just what they say they want."
"Make it plain anyone who cheats you gets a broken neck." Lara shrugged. "You may lose one or two, early, but the rest will know better. Want Saburo and me to handle it for you?"
She sounded almost eager, and Berry laughed. Saburo X was the ex-Ballroom gunman Lara had picked out for herself. Berry often suspected Saburo still didn't understand exactly how it had happened, but after a brief, wary, half-terrified, extremely... direct "courtship," he wasn't complaining. On the face of it, theirs was one of the most unlikely pairings in history-the ex-genetic-slave terrorist, madly in love with the ex-Scrag who'd worked directly for Manpower before she walked away from her own murderous past-and yet, undeniably, it worked.