Three minutes. Frank and Quentin would be heading for the stairs.
Two minutes.
One. Their guards had left, somewhere. There wasn’t a sound, anywhere near.
“You stay with me,” he told Amy and waited the precise last seconds before he opened the door.
They headed out, then. Himself and the kid, out to rouse out Mikhail Corain, if their security moving into position hadn’t triggered Armageddon.
It hadn’t. At least that.
They made it down to Corain’s door, rapped softly, then louder, and there was a soft stir inside. Yanni stood against the door, trying to look casual.
“Mikhail.” he said. “Mikhail, it’s Yanni. Open up.”
Corain opened the door. Had on only underwear and the shirt he’d slept in. His hair stood on end. He turned an appalled look at young Carnath, and started to excuse himself.
“We’re going,” Yanni said, catching Corain’s arm. “Get dressed. Now.”
Corain just nodded, looked anxiously at Amy Carnath, then grabbed his pants off the fat armchair and pulled them on. “Shoes,” he said, searching.
“Here,” Amy said, and he found them and grabbed his coat. Nothing else. Absolutely nothing else but the coat.
Down the hall, then, over blue, figured carpet, to the emergency stairs, the same Frank would have used. Hadn’t moved this fast–
Hadn’t moved this fast, Yanni thought uneasily, since the day Ari had died. Since he’d gotten the advisement, and he’d known every plan he and Ari had ever made was upended, thrown into jeopardy.
Everything since, he’d improvised. Like this, like their escape. Granted they made it.
There was a man unconscious, at the bottom of the landing. He might be dead. He wasn’t hotel staff. He wasn’t theirs. He was wearing a rain‑spattered coat.
“God,” Corain said. Young Carnath didn’t say a thing, just stepped gingerly over the fallen man’s leg, and held onto the briefcase.
BOOK THREE Section 6 Chapter iv
SEPTEMBER 4, 2424
0821H
The late Councillor Bogdanovitch’s son, his sister, and Councillor Harad had made it into Reseune Airport together, in an otherwise empty commercial plane out of Moreyville, and took up residence, young Bogdanovitch and his sister in vacant apartments in the Ed wing, Councillor Harad occupying Jordan’s old apartment.
And beyond that, on following days, things settled back to quiet, much too quiet, in Ari’s estimation. Hicks had transited from close confinement to medical leave, and Ari had assigned a licensed nurse to be living‑in, to be sure neither Kyle nor Hicks himself had rejuv issues–if you got supportive treatment fast, so Ivanov had said, you could sometimes prevent a rejuv collapse, so it was important to keep them both under observation while Kyle tried to get his mental bearings and settle down after the shock he’d had.
Not least–the nurse had a qualification in psych, and kept an eye out for that kind of problem, too. But Kyle couldn’t be questioned as yet. He wasn’t up to it: they had that from the nurse.
Jordan sent a nice letter saying back pay for the last two decades would be greatly appreciated. Ari wrote back saying there might be tax implications he might want to consider regarding a lump sum payment, but she’d start the procedures and pass it on to Yanni when he got there…
Yanni. Yanni was her overwhelming worry. Harad had said Yanni was supposed to have left close behind him, and now it was three days after Harad had arrived, with no Yanni, no word from Amy, who should still be in Novgorod. She’d never understood the phrase worried sick.
Now she did.
The last she’d heard, Amy and Quentin had been in Yanni’s and Corain’s hotel, and they’d been watched. Nearly under house arrest. She hoped for word from Lynch, of Science, in lieu of Yanni, maybe relaying some word or instruction from Yanni; but that didn’t come. What had come, via Harad and Bogdanovitch, was the news that Yanni had arranged a diversionary move toward Lynch, but that the crew who’d attempted it had swung back to the hotel with three cars cutting them off from that route.
And that was that–three days since Harad and young Bogdanovitch had been here, safe, and there was no Yanni, no Corain, no Amy, not a ripple out of ReseuneSec in Novgorod, and Amy didn’t answer Maddy’s discreet personal call.
The situation sent her back to Base One to make sure she understood the constitutional scenario if there was a near‑majority vote and there should be a Council seat vacated by disaster.
Dicey was what it seemed to her: there was a procedure by which the remaining Councillors could unanimously declare a Bureau seat could not be filled within the likely span of an emergency–but the sticky point was that “remaining Councillors” had to include Khalid, who naturally wouldn’t vote to unseat himself…except he hadn’t gotten seated, not officially, and needed a majority of living Councillors to beseated.
That was an interesting point of law, but it was also a real kink in the situation for Khalid. He’d alienated everybody. He was on a collision course with constitutional law–and that wasn’t a major point with most CITs, who didn’t understand it; but it was a nasty situation for Khalid on the one hand and for the constitution on the other.
You could think it’s just a document,she wrote to her successor, in the small hours of the morning, but it’s more. It represents a real point of consensus we haven’t got now, and a lot of people were willing to give up things they wanted so they could get that agreement. It was a point in human history where all of Union agreed to a set of priorities, and now we’ll either prove that agreement still binds everybody, or we’ll prove somebody with enough guns can run everything at any given moment; and that means no peace, even for them.
I never got excited about studying law–until we are a few missile launches away from not having any law at all.
We’ve got to get that consensus back. That means we’ve got to be able to tell people the constitution still works, and make them believe it. That’s why the forms matter. People have to see things done by the rules. We’ve got to make people feel safe again and make them believe that compromises are going to be binding.
Unfortunately people in Khalid’s own Bureau haven’t done anything to stop him.
His Bureau was taking his orders–or, at least, took them far enough to launch that missile. There hasn’t been another. Maybe that means that’s all they had, or all they can get to.
Maybe it means it even shocked people in Defense.
It should have. I hope it did.
She put in a once‑a‑day meeting with the reporters at the airport, who said the broadcasts were having a lot of trouble getting out at Novgorod and they weren’t sure about Planys; but they were still getting out intermittently there and fairly consistently in other places. People were sending bits all over the net, and Defense was trying to block it, but Defense couldn’t stop what other Bureaus ran. So that was doing some good.
She tried to improve her sleep patterns; she still found herself awake at night and napping on her arms on her desk, after being up at 0500h. She finally took to her proper bed in the thought that if she could sleep at all, at any time, she ought to, no matter what else was going on in the world, and no matter how worried she was about Yanni. But she wouldn’t take a sleeping pill.
She’d just about gotten to that nowhere state, all the same, when Florian’s voice said, “Sera. Sera, forgive me, but there’s a report Defense has just moved in on Planys. They’ve shut down all communication. We terminated accesses.”