She pressed the admittance button, and her eyebrows rose as the door opened. It wasn’t Bukato. In fact, it was her junior com officer, a mere citizen lieutenant. Citizen commodores and citizen admirals were a centicredit a dozen around the Octagon. No one paid all that much attention to the gold braid and stars walking past them in the halls, and a mere citizen lieutenant was literally invisible.
“Excuse me, Citizen Secretary,” the young man said. “I just finished those signals Citizen Commodore Justin gave me this afternoon. I was on my way to his office with them when I realized you were still here, and it occurred to me that you might want to take a look at them before I hand them to his yeoman.”
“Why, thank you, Kevin.” McQueen’s voice was completely calm, without even a trace of surprise, but her green eyes sharpened as she held out her hand for the citizen lieutenant’s memo board. Despite his own conversational tone, the young man’s features were drawn for just a moment as their eyes met, and McQueen’s breathing faltered for the briefest instant as she saw the flimsy strip of paper he passed her with the board.
She nodded to him, laid the board on her desk, keyed its display, and bent over it. Had anyone happened to walk into her office at that moment, all they would have seen was the Citizen Secretary of War scanning the message traffic her staffer had brought her. They would never have noticed the strip of paper which slipped from the memo board’s touchpad to her blotter and lay hidden beyond the holo of its display. And because they would not have noticed it, they would never have read the brief, terse words it bore.
“S says EF authorized to move by SJ,” it said. Only that much, but Esther McQueen felt as if a pulser dart had just hit her in the belly.
She’d known it was coming. It had been obvious for months that Saint-Just’s suspicion had overcome his belief that they needed her skills, but she’d believed Pierre was wiser than that… at least where the military situation was concerned.
But maybe I only needed to believe that because I wasn’t ready. The thought was unnaturally calm. I needed more time, because we’re still not ready. Just a couple of more weeks—a month at the outside—would have done it. But it looks like waiting is a luxury I’ve just run out of.
She drew a deep breath as she hit the advance button and her eyes appeared to scan the display. Her free hand gathered up the thin paper, crushing it into a tiny pellet, and she reached up to rub her chin… and popped the pellet into her mouth. She swallowed the evidence and hit the advance button again.
Thirty percent. That was her current estimate of the chance of success. A one-third chance was hardly something she would willingly have risked her life upon, or asked others to risk their lives on with her, if she’d had an option. But if Saint-Just had authorized Fontein to move, she didn’t have an option, and thirty percent was one hell of a lot better than no chance at all. Which was what she’d have if she waited until they pulled the trigger.
She paged through to the final message in the board, then nodded and held it out to the citizen lieutenant. Incomplete though her plans were, she’d been careful to craft each layer independently of the layers to follow it. And she could activate her entire strategy—such as it was and what there was of it at this stage—with a single com call. She wouldn’t even have to say anything, for the combination she would punch into her com differed from Ivan Bukato’s voice mail number only in the transposition of two digits. It was a combination she’d never used before and would never use again, but the person at the other end of it would recognize her face. All she had to do was apologize for mistakenly screening a stranger so late at night, and the activation order would be passed.
“Thank you, Kevin,” she said again. “Those all look fine. I’m sure Citizen Commodore Justin will want to look them over as well, of course, but they seem to cover everything I was concerned about. I appreciate it.” Her voice was still casual, but the glow in her green eyes was anything but as they met the com officer’s squarely.
“You’re welcome, Ma’am,” Citizen Lieutenant Kevin Caminetti said, and the younger brother of Oscar Saint-Just’s personal secretary tucked the memo board under his arm, saluted sharply, and marched out of Esther McQueen’s office.
Behind him, she reached for her com’s touchpad with a rock-steady hand.
* * *
Citizen Lieutenant Mikis Tsakakis sighed mentally as he followed Citizen Secretary Saint-Just down the hallway from the lift shaft. By tradition, the night security assignment for any public figure was supposed to be less demanding than the task of protecting the same individual during normal business hours. And Tsakakis supposed that there had to be some basis for that traditional belief, even though his own experience scarcely supported it.
All of Oscar Saint-Just’s personal security team knew that the Citizen Secretary for State Security liked to work late. Unfortunately, he also liked to work early. In fact, he had an uncomfortable habit of going in to his office at utterly unpredictable hours, especially when some particular crisis or concern hovered in the background.
No one could fault the hours that he put in, and none of his subordinates were about to criticize the work habits of the second most powerful man in the People’s Republic of Haven. But that didn’t mean that Tsakakis and his people liked it. Unlike Saint-Just, some of them actually preferred a semi-regular schedule with comfortable chunks of time allotted to such mundane concerns as sleep, or perhaps a modicum of a social life. A little time with a wife or husband on some sort of predictable basis wouldn’t have come amiss, either.
Not that any of them would ever consider complaining about their charge’s schedule. That would have been… unwise. Even more to the point, it would have been a quick way to get themselves removed from the citizen secretary’s protective detail, and for all its worries and inconvenience, there was fierce competition for that position. Outsiders might have been surprised to discover that, yet it was true. It wasn’t so much that StateSec’s personnel loved their commander, because in truth he wasn’t a particularly lovable person. But they did respect him, and however the rest of the universe might see him, he was normally unfailingly polite to the people who worked for him. Besides, the only State Security assignment which offered greater responsibility or prestige—or chance of promotion—was the Citizen Chairman’s personal detail.
Still, protecting the most hated man in the entire People’s Republic was scarcely a tension-free vocation. Only a lunatic would think he had even the most remote chance of penetrating Saint-Just’s security screen, but historically speaking, lunatics had an unfortunate track record of success. Or of at least taking out the odd bodyguard in the attempt. All of which tended to keep one on one’s toes.
It also helped Tsakakis to take his boss’s unpredictable and inconvenient work schedule with a certain philosophical acceptance. Yes, it made his life difficult. But it also made it even more difficult for a potential assassin to predict the citizen secretary’s movements with any degree of confidence. And if his principal’s habit of disordering all of the citizen lieutenant’s carefully worked out schedules without warning kept his entire team off balance, it also prevented them from settling into a comfortable, overconfident rut.
Tsakakis reminded himself firmly that staying out of a rut was a good thing, but it was unusually difficult at the moment. He had no idea what could have inspired the citizen secretary to get up four hours early, but it would have been helpful if he’d mentioned the possibility that he might do so before he turned in for the night. If he had, Tsakakis and the normal daytime security commander could have coordinated their schedules properly. As it was, the citizen lieutenant had been forced to screen Citizen Captain Russell—again—to alert her to the fact that Citizen Secretary Saint-Just would not, in fact, be at home where she expected to find him when she and her people reported for duty. The citizen captain was as accustomed as Tsakakis himself to such sudden and unpredictable alterations, but that didn’t make her any happier about being awakened at two in the morning so that she could start waking up all of the rest of her people, as well. It hadn’t made her any less grumpy, either, and even though she’d known it wasn’t Tsakakis’ fault, she’d torn a strip off his hide just to relieve her own irritability.