“Did we let this happen on our watch?” she demanded angrily. “After knowing that two other ambassadors had died in questionable circumstances?” She closed the dossier in front of her and flattened it against the table, pressing until her knuckles turned white.
“No.” George took a deep breath. “She was the first to die — just the last for us to be aware of. At first we penciled it in as a simple murder — horrible, but not special. Unlike the other two incidents we have a complete crime scene breakdown and we’re pursuing the murderer with every resource at our disposal. We are” — he took another breath — “appalled and outraged that this has happened. But more than that, we’re very much afraid that it’s going to happen again. Tranh, could you explain?”
Tranh stood up again and began to recite in a flat monotone that suggested that he, too, was trying to hold down the lid on his outrage. “Ambassador Davis was discovered in the state you see by a housekeeper maintenance contractor who called to deal with a fault alert by the house cleaning ’bot. The amah was confused by, well, a conflict between its recognizer for human beings and its garbage collection monitor. That doesn’t happen very often these days, but Ambassador Davis had an antique that still had a heuristic support contract in force. Embassy security admitted the maintenance contractor and immediately discovered the ambassador in this state. They immediately requested our assistance — unlike their counterparts on Turku.” His voice quivered with outrage as he added, “The killer used a bungee cord for a ligature.”
Foul play? That’s one way of putting it, Rachel observed. Ambassadors did not, as a rule, hang themselves in the stairwell of their own residences using rubberized ropes. Nor did they do so after pinioning their hands behind them, not to mention fracturing the backs of their skulls on mysteriously missing blunt objects.
“Ah yes, she shot herself three times in the back of the head and jumped out of the sixth floor window just to make us look bad,” she muttered, drawing a wide-eyed look of confusion from Gail. “When did this happen relative to the others? In the empire time defined by the Moscow embassy causal channels, if you’ve got the figures. That might tell us something.”
“The order was” — George flipped pages in a separate file — “Ambassador Davis at datum zero, followed by Simonette Black at T plus fourteen days, six hours, three minutes. Then Ambassador Pendelton thirty-four days, nineteen hours and fifty-two minutes later.” He gazed at Rachel tiredly. “Any other questions?”
“Yes.” She leaned back in her chair, tapping her stylus on the cover of her briefing file. “Are Turku and the, uh, Frisian Foundation coordinating their investigations? Are they even aware of the other assassinations?”
“No and no.” George inclined his head slightly. “You have more questions. Let’s hear them, and your reasoning.”
“All right.” Rachel sat up straight and looked at Gail. “You might not want to hear this.”
“I can take it.” She looked back, angry and bewildered. “I don’t have to like it.”
“Okay.” Rachel tapped the file in front of her. “As the man said, once is happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but three times is enemy action. We have a very nasty situation evolving, in which there exists a dwindling pool of assets — ambassadors — such that if the total drops below three, 800 million people will die. From an initial nine survivors, three have been murdered in the past three months. I assume the rest are under heavy guard—”
“Wherever possible,” George murmured.
“—But we basically have a crisis on our hands. Someone has figured out how to kill 800 million birds with just six stones. Leaving aside the killer’s evident penchant for cruel practical jokes, we know absolutely nothing about who they are and what motivates them. In fact, what we appear to know may actually be deliberate deception. And we’re the only people who are treating these assassinations as part of a big picture, rather than isolated killings.”
“That’s essentially correct,” said Tranh. “There are other investigative measures we are taking, but” — he shrugged, looking unhappy — “it takes time.”
“Well then.” Rachel licked her lips, which had become unpleasantly dry. “As I see it, our ideal outcome is to convince them to issue the abort code to the bombers immediately, before any more of them die. But right now they’ll probably view any such request with extreme suspicion — the murders could be seen as a conspiracy to force them to issue the code. Or we could prove to them that the New Dresdeners didn’t do the dirty deed and show them who did — if we have any idea.”
She nodded when Cho shook his head. “I was afraid of that. The other option is to stake out a goat, wait for the assassins to show up, and try to trace them back to their masters. But we have a mess of motives at work here. Someone seems to want to ensure that the Muscovite weapons destroy New Dresden, and I’ve got to ask, why? Who could possibly benefit from wiping out one — or maybe even two — planets?” She glanced around the table.
“That’s essentially where we’ve got to,” George said heavily, “except for the final part.”
“Explain.” She leaned forward attentively.
“We don’t have time to stake them all out. Given the current attrition rate, we’ve got to face the risk of losing four more ambassadors in the next month. We haven’t caught a single assassin, so we don’t know who’s doing it. So tell me what you deduce from that fact.”
“That we’re in the shit,” Rachel said in a low monotone. She leaned forward tensely. “Let’s look at this as a crime in progress. If we shelve the means and opportunity questions, who’s got a motive? Who could possibly gain by arranging for Moscow to bomb the crap out of Dresden in thirty-five years’ time?”
She held up a hand and began counting off fingers. “One: a third party who hates Dresden. I think we can take that as a non sequitur; nobody is ever crazy enough to want to exterminate an entire planet. At least, nobody who’s that crazy ever gets their hands on the means to do it.” Well, virtually nobody, she reminded herself, flashing back a week. Idi would have done it — if he’d had an R-bomb. But he didn’t. So … “Two: a faction among the Muscovite exiles who really, really hates Dresden — enough to commit murder, murder of their own people, just to make sure. Three: someone who wants to strike a negotiating position of some kind. It could be blackmail, for example, and the ransom note hasn’t arrived yet. Four: it’s a continent smasher. Could be a really nasty bunch of folks have decided to make sure it goes home, as a prelude to a, uh, rescue and reconstruction mission of a rather permanent nature.”
“You’re saying it could be some other government that wants to take advantage of the situation?” Gail looked aghast.
“That’s realpolitik for you.” Rachel shrugged. “I’m not saying it is, but … do we have any candidates?” She raised an eyebrow at Tranh.
“Possibly.” He frowned. “Among the neighbors … I can’t see the New Republic doing that, can you?”
Rachel shook her head. “They’re out for the count.”
“Then, hmm. Forget Turku, forget Malacia, forget Septagon. None of them have an expansionist government except Septagon, and they’re not interested in anything with a primary that masses more than point zero five of Sol or comes with inhabitable planets. There’s Newpeace, but they’re still in a mess from the civil war. And Eiger isn’t likely. Tonto, that’s another of those weird semiclosed dictatorships. They might have an angle on it. But it’s not anything obvious, is it?”
Rachel frowned. “There seem to be a couple of dictatorships in this sector, aren’t there? Funny: they aren’t normally stable enough to last…”