“Sir, I assure you that I had absolutely no reason to suspect that Azhari was even considering such a betrayal!” Speer broke in. “I’ll have his family picked up immediately, and—”
“I didn’t say it was your fault, Rachel,” Saint-Just said flatly, “and assuming that you and I both survive, there will be time to deal with his actions later. I only mentioned them to make the point that we can’t afford to delay any longer. So I am authorizing and directing you to execute Bank Shot immediately.”
Citizen General Speer’s expression tightened, and her eyes widened ever so slightly. Saint-Just watched her reaction carefully, and he was rather reassured by what he saw. He’d been half-afraid that she might object or argue, but she’d obviously had time enough to realize that Bank Shot was a possibility from the outset. And it was equally obvious that whatever she thought of the notion, she was not about to risk anything which might be construed as less than total loyalty at this particular moment in the history of the People’s Republic. Still…
“Sir, have you considered warning McQueen about the possibility of Bank Shot?” she asked very carefully.
“I have. And rejected it,” Saint-Just said flatly. He held her eyes unflinchingly, then waved one hand in a small gesture. “The woman is a realist, Rachel, so you might be right; if we tell her what we can do to her, she might at least try to negotiate some settlement. But we’d also have to tell her how Bank Shot works if we expected her to believe us, and we can’t risk the possibility of her stalling just long enough to locate the hole in her defenses and plug it.”
Speer was silent for another ten seconds, then nodded.
“Yes, Sir. I understand,” she said after only the briefest pause. “I’ll begin the evacuation at once, and—”
“I don’t think you did understand me fully, Citizen General,” Saint-Just interrupted in a voice whose tone of icy calm surprised even him. “I am instructing you to execute Bank Shot immediately. There will be no evacuation.”
“But, Sir! I mean, I realize the situation is critical, but we’re talking about—”
Speer failed to keep the consternation out of her expression, and Saint-Just saw something very like horror in her eyes, but he cut her off brusquely.
“I understand precisely what we’re talking about, Citizen General,” he said, still in that icy voice. “As I just pointed out, however, whatever else she may be, McQueen is no fool. If she sees us evacuating any towers outside the immediate vicinity of the Octagon, she’s entirely capable of realizing what’s coming just as if we’d warned her intentionally. Which would put the ball in her court, if she chose to go back on the air. What if she figures it out and appeals to Capital Fleet to prevent it?” He shook his head. “No. There’s no way of knowing where things might go, so I will repeat myself once, and once only. There will be no evacuation. Is that understood, Citizen General Speer?”
Rachel Speer opened her mouth, then closed it again. For perhaps three seconds, she said nothing at all, but then she nodded.
“Yes, Sir, Citizen Secretary. I understand.”
“—so I believe it’s time that you reconsider your position, Citizen Commissioner,” Esther McQueen said calmly. She sipped coffee from the Navy cup in her hand and smiled ever so slightly as Erasmus Fontein drank from a matching cup. She found herself forced to genuinely admire the people’s commissioner’s air of calm composure, and she was determined to appear just as composed.
“You manage to make it sound so reasonable, Citizen Secretary,” the StateSec man observed after a moment. “Unfortunately, Citizen Secretary Saint-Just might not find it quite so sensible of me.”
“Oh, come now!” McQueen chided. “You know as well as I do how little legitimacy Saint-Just can command on his own. I have all of the rest of the Committee here in the Octagon, and two-thirds of them have already agreed to publicly support me. StateSec officers are even beginning to come over—not in enormous numbers yet, perhaps, but to come over. More to the point, perhaps, Capital Fleet hasn’t made a move. They may not have opened fire on their StateSec watchdogs, but Saint-Just hasn’t been able to get them to fire on us, either, and you know what that means as well as I do. It’s been over fifteen hours now, and he hasn’t been able to suppress us, and he’s the one whose support base is eroding out from under him. When the rest of the Committee comes in on my side, he’s finished.”
Fontein sipped more coffee, buying time to think before he responded, and she was content to let him. Both of them knew how critical it was for Saint-Just to defeat the challenge she represented quickly. That would have been vital under any circumstances, but with Rob Pierre dead it became even more crucial to Saint-Just’s hope of survival to crush any challenge to his own authority quickly. As the Revolution’s watchdog, Oscar Saint-Just was undoubtedly the most hated single individual in the entire People’s Republic of Haven. If any alternative to him even looked as if it might be viable, his hold on power would become far worse than merely precarious.
Fontein lowered his cup and stared into it for several seconds, then raised his head and looked squarely into McQueen’s eyes.
“You might be right about that,” he said finally. “But Oscar may just surprise you yet. And even if he doesn’t, even if you actually manage to pull it off, what in God’s name pushed you into trying it in the first place? My God, woman! You may pull it off, but you had to be insane to risk everything on one throw of the dice this way! And please don’t try to tell me that you were ‘ready’ for all of this. I’ve been assigned to you too long not to recognize when you’re improvising as you go along.”
“Of course I’m improvising,” she told him. “I didn’t have much choice when you and Saint-Just decided I had to go, but I won’t pretend that I had all of my own plans firmly in place.” She shook her head. “I never thought Pierre would authorize my removal before we knew for certain that the Manties were on the ropes.”
“What are you talking about?” Fontein demanded, and McQueen’s eyebrows rose at the genuine surprise in his voice.
“Please, Citizen Commissioner,” she said. “I won’t pretend I was happy to learn that Saint-Just had authorized you to move against me, but I decided that I should consider that was only business, not personal. Under the circumstances, it’s hardly necessary for you to try to pretend he hadn’t, though.”
“But he—” Fontein began, then cut himself off. He stared at her for several seconds, and then chuckled with absolutely no humor at all.
“I don’t know why you think Oscar was planning to remove you any time soon,” he told her, then waved one hand in the air as he saw her expression of disbelief. “Oh, I’m not saying that he hadn’t decided you had to go, Citizen Secretary. I’m only saying that anything he and I discussed was at a very preliminary stage. The, ah, evidence preparing stage, one might say. In point of fact, I was instructed not to act against you in any other way without his specific authorization, because the Citizen Chairman hadn’t authorized him to act.”
It was McQueen’s turn to be surprised. Almost against her will, she found that she actually believed him, and she began to chuckle herself.
“It would have been much simpler all around if you could have just told me that, Citizen Commissioner,” she said after a moment. “If I’d had just two more weeks to put things together, Saint-Just never would have known what hit him, much less had time to respond! Still, I suppose all’s well that ends well.”
“I still believe that congratulating yourself on victory could be a bit premature,” Fontein said. “On the other hand, you’re right about Oscar’s failure to suppress your little mutiny quickly. And if you truly do have the rest of the Committee in your pocket, I suppose the odds are that you really will manage to pull it off in the end. I trust you won’t think any less of me if I admit that I would prefer to survive rather than to die a principled but useless death. I don’t suppose you’d care to troll any offers of high office under the new regime under my nose to entice me to shift allegiance, would you?”