Downing looked up from scribbling on his dataslate. “Beijing and Moscow?”
Nolan nodded. “The predictable axes were ground.”
“But they’re going to play nice?”
“So they say.”
Caine frowned. “This all sounds surprisingly civilized.”
“We knew that there would be a baseline of sanity from some of the blocs. Of course, there were still a few cranky gadflies in the ointment-even from the EU.”
Downing grunted. “Oh? Who?”
“Well…Gaspard.”
“But of course. Parisian diplomat of the old school. Wanker.”
“C’mon, Rich, cut him some slack. He’s fighting to maintain some shred of France’s past preeminence-”
Downing tapped his pencil. “Well, he-and the rest of his ilk-will just have to bloody well get used to the fact that France hasn’t been an empire since Napoleon left Moscow.”
“That’s a hard thing for a country to accept.”
“Rot. Look at England: we’ve faced facts and moved on.”
Nolan’s left eyebrow arched. “Oh? Really?” Downing’s mouth was open to begin a rebuttal, but Nolan held up his hand. “For now, let’s just get through the day’s news. Which boils down to this: the Confederation government will be a council of five blocs, two voting members per bloc, and one proconsul with a two-year term.”
Downing tapped his stylus on his slate. “Military authority?”
“Separate forces and R amp;D within each bloc. However, each bloc structures its forces and production to meet the defense responsibilities assigned to it by the Confederation Council.”
Downing seemed pensive. “And-what about intelligence operations?”
“The same model; separate national agencies, coordinated at the bloc level. Each bloc then contributes some assets to a centralized Confederation bureau.”
“With which IRIS can augment its own data gathering and spread its influence.”
Caine looked from Downing to Nolan and back to Downing: the same shrewd, satisfied smile on both faces. “You’re not going to tell them about IRIS? I mean, isn’t this the logical moment?”
Downing studied his fingers. “No: revealing IRIS now would destroy this infant Confederation in its crib.”
“Why?”
“For twenty years, strings have been pulled, policies have been massaged-almost exclusively by agents of the Commonwealth bloc-to bring delegates of the world’s most powerful nations to this very place. If they were to learn that they are here because they have been played like puppets, they would utterly renounce this summit. But if we wait until the Confederation is a fait accompli, then we’ll be able to stand down safely and quietly.”
Caine shook his head. “I wonder how many times a misguided international involvement has been prolonged with that kind of rhetoric: ‘We will leave once the situation has been stabilized.’”
Nolan shrugged. “Historical precedent is on your side, so I won’t argue. I can only say that the alternative seems worse to me.”
Caine silently conceded that Nolan also had a good-maybe superior-point. “So, what now?”
Nolan produced a bottle from the credenza, glanced at Richard. “Metaxa?”
“A double, if you please.”
Nolan turned to Caine. “Want to join us? Just our little evening ritual.”
“Thanks, I’ll pass. I’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
Nolan nodded. “We all do. But I could use some exercise to clear my head: want to take a walk up to the temple before dinner?”
Already halfway out, Caine turned. Not really. But he said: “Sure. I’ll come along.”
Chapter Nineteen
MENTOR
On his way out the door, Caine added, “Find me when you’re done here.”
“I will.” Nolan pushed a glass of Metaxa toward Richard.
Caine nodded, closed the door behind him.
Nolan picked up his glass. “Do you think he suspects?”
“That we used him as bait? Not yet-maybe never, given how close we came to cocking up the whole op.”
“What the hell happened out there?”
“Damned if I know-but for some reason, he and Opal stopped in the only blind spot on that side of the mountain.”
“Thank God the overwatch team adapted quickly.”
Downing nodded. “Your son trained them well.”
“And he’s been kept in the dark about us tapping his former team for this op?”
“Trevor doesn’t know a thing. But how long that will last is hard to say.”
Nolan sighed. “I know: SEALS are rough, tough commandos, but they gossip like wrinkled church ladies among themselves. Still, they did a good job.”
“No slight intended, but we may owe more to good luck. Things could have worked out very differently. Almost did.”
“Well, we still drew the opposition out, forced them to make their move in a time and a place of our choosing, and trumped their hand. And we manufactured the bonding crisis that the psych folks insist will bring Caine and Opal together quickly and surely.”
“Yes-but we created more of a crisis than we could handle. I still say it was unreasonably risky, Nolan.” Downing would have preferred the word “reckless.” “Today’s operation came too bloody close to destroying the very asset it was designed to protect.”
“Look, Rich, after Alexandria, we have to accept that conventional notions of security are damn near useless. Whoever’s after Caine has proven that they can hit a stationary target using methods we don’t even understand. So I stand by my decision: drawing them out for a preemptive counterstrike was actually less risky than digging in and hunkering down. And now, Riordan’s worries are over. Our local security is good, EU forces are pouring into the area in preparation for tomorrow’s meeting, and our opponents know they’ve lost the element of surprise. We’re out of the woods.”
A nice theory. Downing sipped the Metaxa. Let’s hope it’s accurate. “Even if they were amateurs, it would have been damned helpful to get some identities.”
“Yeah, as is anything that might show us who’s after Riordan. Speaking of which, any word of the forensics analysis on Alexandria?”
Downing nodded. “The final after-action report came in this morning’s pouch. The analysts are now speculating that Riordan may not have been the only target; they may have been after all the coldsleepers.”
“What has the analysts thinking that?”
“Well, the power outage killed almost all the sleepers within minutes: with both the main current and the backup generator out, those early cryocells had only five minutes of emergency battery power.”
“You said the power outage killed almost all the sleepers?
“Yes: three others were in modern cryopods, so their systems defaulted to long-duration self-power when the generator went offline.”
“So they’re alive?”
“No, they’re dead too.”
“How?”
“The intruders shot them.”
Nolan’s glass froze in the transit from tabletop to mouth. “Say again?”
Downing nodded. “You heard me correctly: the intruders shot them.”
Nolan returned the glass to the table. “Not good.”
“No, no good at all. That’s why the analysts are rethinking why the attackers were there in the first place, and the rationale behind their tactics. Did they cut power to make it easier to infiltrate and secure local tactical control…?”
“Or was it to kill off all the sleepers?” Nolan finished for him. “Christ, Rich, you were dead right when you suggested we replace the original sleepers with death-row inmates. If we hadn’t, we’d have another forty or fifty innocent corpses on our hands.”
“Sixty-three.”
“Okay, you can rub it in: you’re entitled.” Nolan bolted back most of his Metaxa. “When the intruders killed the other sleepers, did they bother to open the cryocell lids and check for identities?”
“No. So the enemy strikers could not have learned that we switched the occupants. Which brings up yet another related issue: when should we inform the penal authorities?”