Harconan glanced over his shoulder. “That? That’s just business, Amanda, just business. I steal it from your industrialists and sell it to their industrialists. They’ll work on it for a while and make a few improvements, and then your industrialists will come along and steal it back again. In the long run everyone gains.”
“What about the crew of the INDASAT Starcatcher, Makara?” she asked, verbally clawing at him with deliberation. “What did they gain?”
She heard the breath hiss between his teeth. His hand went past her head and he braced himself against the wall.
“How did you find out about Sonoo and the others?” he demanded, changing the subject.
“I can’t tell you, Makara. You know that.”
“How much more do you and your admiral know?”
“I can’t tell you that, either. If you want me to understand you, Makara, you have to understand me.” She was careful to invoke his first name again, careful to choose her words. “I will not betray my people, not even for you.”
She trailed off that final hinted possibility.
Frustration edged Harconan’s voice. “This isn’t a game, Amanda! I have my people to think about as well.”
“I’m aware of that.”
His hand went back to her throat, thumb and middle finger digging in beneath her jaw. “Damn you, you could be made to talk! Everyone talks eventually.”
“I’m aware of that, too, Makara,” she replied calmly. She was leaning over the edge now. Deliberately testing. “But if you’ve studied me as much as you say you have, you’ll know I’m a ‘Mustang’ graduate. You’ll know what that means. I can hold out a long, long time before I break. After your people are finished, what’s left won’t be worth taking to bed.”
“Damn it, Amanda! There are other ways… drugs…”
“I know about them too,” She let a hint of sadness tinge her voice. “I know how to fight them as well. If you want to be sure of the answers you’ll get, you’re going to have to put me under so deep I probably won’t come back. No is the only answer I can give, my love, so you decide and let’s just get on with it.”
She’d called him her love. Would that be her ticket back from the edge?
The pressure under her jaw eased and his hand dropped. He looked away, then lifted his voice, calling over a couple of the cavern security guards. Curtly he issued them a command.
“These men will take you to the cabin on the Flores. You’ll be held there for now.”
Amanda didn’t reply.
As promised, the captain’s cabin aboard the freighter had been modernized and given a comfortable civilian conversion, complete with mock teak-paneled bulkheads, a queen-size bed instead of bunks, air conditioning, and an attached head.
The dogging nuts on the two exterior portholes were also torqued down to the point where they were immobile without a wrench, and the steel fire door had a newly added exterior bolt that was thrown after the door had closed behind her.
Amanda crossed to the cabin’s built-in couch and sank down upon it, her arms crossed over her stomach in a self-embrace. For the first time in days she was cool, but that wasn’t why she was shivering.
She’d pushed it close by scaring Sonoo that way, very close indeed. No doubt anonymity had been promised to both the technicians and the firms they’d represented. That their names were known on the outside was probably a very unpleasant surprise that would have those tech reps sweating and Harconan doing some tall explaining.
She’d had to do it, though. Harconan could read her too well. He was expecting some kind of fight from her. If she let herself be too submissive, too pliant — if she yielded on too many points too rapidly — he’d scent the falsehood.
On the other hand, dicing with kings could be a dangerous sport. Henry VIII had probably been quite fond of Anne Boleyn right up until she’d gotten mouthy that one time too often.
Amanda stood up abruptly. Crossing to the head, she checked the shower to see if she was within water hours. She was. Stripping off her single layer of clothing, she stepped under the water, turning it up as hot as she could stand.
When she emerged, sleek and steaming, a few minutes later, she was redheaded again, the dye having washed out. Somehow that made her feel better.
What did he really want from her? Why was he holding back? Why was he risking his kingdom? Could she actually be that attractive in Harconan’s eyes? She couldn’t be that good of a lay.
Was it truly something more?
“Damn, damn, damn,” she murmured to the empty room. “I guess he’s as big an idiot as I am.”
Joint Intelligence Center, USS Carlson
1040 Hours, Zone Time: August 23, 2008
The word didn’t have to be passed when the priority data dump came in from NAVSPECFORCE HQ. In the face of the multiple layers of steel and sound insulation around the joint intelligence center, Christine Rendino’s piercing scream of joy and triumph echoed through the Carlson’s passageways.
Five minutes later, Admiral MacIntyre was in JIC, studying an image on the central bulkhead flatscreen. To him it resembled a rather bizarre example of extremely esoteric modern art: a series of oblong blobs of a puckered yellow-orange curving across a light-green background.
“All right, Chris. What am I looking at?”
“Oil slicks, sir. Trace oil slicks in the Banda Sea as seen from low earth orbit. These were part of a multispectral reflectivity sweep of Indonesia taken this morning by an NIA Keyhole reconsat.”
Obviously the image meant much more than that, because the little intel was on the verge of exploding. She was hugging herself, and tears glinted in the corners of her eyes. MacIntyre had never seen her grinning so before.
“And?” MacIntyre asked cautiously.
“And it’s a message, sir. A message addressed to us.”
Dubious, MacIntyre stared at the computer-enhanced blobs once more. “A message?”
“Yes, sir, a goddamn message! Jones, run the imaging correction program for wind and current drift.”
The systems operator did so, and the oblong blobs snapped into a straight line. Suddenly it leaped off the screen into Maclntyre’s face. “That’s Morse code!”
“Yes, sir, with the exact three-to-one unit and character spacings: dot dash, A, break, dash dash dot, G. A G, Amanda Garrett! She’s telling us where she is in a line of code fifteen miles long!”
“By God!” Maclntyre’s fist lifted with deliberation, smashing down on the seat back of the workstation he was standing behind. “By God! How did she manage that?”
“Amanda must have remembered how we back tracked the INDASAT Starcatcher to her sinking point by her trace oil slick. She must have banked on us doing another multispectral sweep of the archipelago.”
“What’s the position on this thing?”
“The more important question is, sir, is: What was its position when it was laid? Jonesy, give us the chart on the eastern Banda Sea on Display Two, then designate the time- and drift-adjusted coordinates of the slick.”
Christine continued excitedly, “The imaging center ran an analysis of the slick’s pattern of dispersal and distortion, applying the Banda Sea current patterns from our oceanographic database and the regional weather states for the past forty-eight hours. Their best estimate is that the slick was generated sometime yesterday evening at this position: northeast of the Kai Island group, in the western approaches to New Guinea, about a hundred and seventy-five miles off the coast. They figure it was produced by a surface craft with a rate of advance of about ten to twelve knots, maintaining a heading of east by northeast.”