“I mean, abolishing the kinds of events they build places like the Imperial Peace Museum to remember.” She glanced at Elspeth. “Your call?”
Ambassador Morrow stared at her through half-narrowed eyes. “I think your ambition is very laudable,” she said slowly. “And I’d like to hear about your experiences here sometime.” But not right now. I don’t want to lose my lunch, Rachel projected cynically. “Meanwhile, why don’t you work with Willem here to arrange a follow-on meeting, at our mutual convenience?”
“I’ll do that.” Rachel nodded. “Take care.”
“I shall,” said Morrow, standing up and holding her arms out for her coat. “You, too,” she said impulsively, then her bodyguards and secretary followed her, the latter watching Rachel mistrustfully as his mistress walked away. They vanished into the crowd, and her main course arrived. Rachel ate it slowly, her thoughts elsewhere. I wonder what Martin will think?
“You can’t be serious!”
She’d rarely seen him so disturbed, and never by something she’d told him: “Why? What makes you think I’m joking?”
“I—” He was pacing, always a bad sign. “I don’t.” Ah, a sign of realism. “I just don’t like it, for extremely large values of don’t and like.” He turned to face her, his back to the wall-screen of the promenade deck: with the almost flat horizon of the planet behind him, it looked as if he was walking on the atmosphere. “Please, Rachel. Please tell me this isn’t as bad as it sounds?”
She took a deep breath. “Martin, if I wanted to kill myself, do you think I’d go about it this indirectly?”
“No, but I think your sense of responsibility” — he saw where he was going almost before she did, and swerved to avoid the abyss — “may lead you into working within operational constraints that you don’t need to be bound by.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Phew. Don’t mean to lecture you. It’s your specialty, and so on.” Then he looked at her, with worry in his eyes, and she felt herself beginning to melt: “But are you sure it’s safe?”
“Don’t you go quoting William Palmer’s last words at me,” she threw back at him. “Of course I’m not sure it’s safe!” She folded her arms defensively. “It’s as safe as I can make it, and for sure it’s safer than letting some lunatic sign a death warrant for 800 million mostly innocent people. But it’s not safe-safe. Now if you’re through trying to mother me, will you listen while I talk you through the threat tree and tell me if you spot anything that everybody else has missed?”
“The threat tree—” Martin almost went cross-eyed trying to hold the topic in his head. “Rachel?”
“Oh shit!” She looked at him with mingled affection and exasperation. Two years of being married to him hadn’t blunted the former, but she’d been a big girl with her own life before Martin — in his late sixties, despite looking like a midtwentysomething — had been even a twinkling in his mother’s eye. And sometimes she felt like a cradle snatcher. He didn’t yet have the chilly detachment that came from having a child die of avoidable old age, embraced by reason of either religious conviction or plain old-fashioned boredom with life. Maybe he never would, and she’d love him no less for it, but at times it made him a mite hard to live with. “Do you really think that I’d do something rash enough to cost me this?” She took two steps forward and buried her chin in the base of his neck, as his arms automatically wrapped around her.
“I know you would, Rache. I know about you and your quixotic campaigns to fix entire fucked-up planets. Remember?”
She whispered in his ear: “Only because you’d do the same.”
“Yeah, but I was doing it strictly cash on delivery. And for the best possible reason.” Because the nearest thing this crazy universe could provide to a deity had phoned him up one day and asked him how much he’d charge for sabotaging time machines before the lunatics who built them could switch them on and destroy the coherency of history, including the chain of events leading to the creation of the god in question. “You tend to do it when you get overenthusiastic.”
“No, I tend to do it when I get angry,” she replied, and goosed him. He yelped. “You don’t like it when I get angry!”
“No, no, I like you fine.” He gasped. She laughed: she couldn’t help herself. A moment later Martin was chuckling, too, leaning on her shoulder for support.
After a while they sobered up. “I’m not going to let some crazy get close enough to kill me, Martin. I’m just going to wear the face and stand at the back of a room with a couple of tons of concealed security in front of me. I want them to think they’ve got a clean shot at me, not give them the real thing.”
“I’ve seen too many harebrained schemes like this go wrong.” She let go of him, took a step back to watch his face. “And it leaves me feeling like a spare wheel. Not” — he glanced over his shoulder — “that I’m anything else, here.”
“Well, that’s what you get for marrying into the diplomatic corps.” She frowned. “But there’s one thing you could do for me. I asked George, and he says it’s okay. It’s not dangerous—”
“Not dangerous?” He squinted suspiciously. “That’ll be a first for something you cooked up.”
“Shut up. Listen, George thought it would be a good idea if while I’m at the Muscovite embassy running this little honeypot scheme, you took a trip up the beanstalk and had a guided tour of the Romanov while she’s in dock. Your usual employer built bits of her, and I can get you an intro with the Captain. I just want you to go take a look around, see if you smell anything fishy. We can make it official if you want.”
“The last time you guys wanted me to go take an unofficial sniff around a ship I seem to recall we both got shanghaied into a six-month cruise to a war zone,” he said drily.
“That’s not the idea this time.” She smiled, then turned away. Mixed memories: Martin had not enjoyed the experience much, and at the time neither had she, but if it hadn’t happened, they wouldn’t have met, wouldn’t have married, wouldn’t be together. It was too easy, after the event, to gloss over the dark, frightening aspects of a bad experience inextricably linked to something else that was very good indeed. “I’m not sure what, if anything, I expect you to find. Probably nothing, but if you can hit on the Captain for a full passenger manifest including stopovers, and ask around if anyone’s been behaving oddly. I mean, if there’s a passenger in first class who never shows up at dinner because the voices in his head tell him to stay in his cabin and polish the guns…”
“Check.” He sighed. “It’s a WhiteStar ship, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Why, is that good or bad?”
“Commercial, very commercial. I hope you guys have got something on the bottom line to offer the Captain, or he’s not going to be too keen on wasting time on someone like me.”
“She, Captain Nazma Hussein. And she’s not going to yelp too loudly. Why do you think George put you on the payroll? She doesn’t need to know you’re down as an unpaid intern; just turn up and wave your diplomatic passport at her and act polite but firm. If you get any shit, pass it on to George.” She grinned. “It’s about the only perk of the job.”
“You’re going to take care, aren’t you?” He stared at her.
“You bet.”
“Okay.” He closed the gap between them, and she wrapped her arms around him. He leaned close to kiss her forehead. “Let’s hope you can get this nailed down so we can go home soon.”
“Oh, I’m sure we will.” She held him tight. “And I’m not going to take any risks, Martin. I want to live long enough to see that child of ours decanted.”
Three days of frenetic preparation passed like quicksilver running down a rainy gutter, unticlass="underline"
“Four hours ago? First passengers should have hit the terminal when? Very good. Thanks, I’ll be ready.” Rachel flipped her phone shut and tried to get her racing pulse back under control. “It’s started,” she called through the open door.