Anton Donati was holding down Stoddard’s desk now. Lefarge had worked with him often over the years; less so since the New America project got well underway and he was seldom on Earth. About his own age, thin and dark and precise, with a mustache that looked as if it had been drawn on. Competent record in the field, even better once he was back at headquarters. But a by-the-book man, a through-channels operator. The other man in the room was a stranger, a civilian in a blue-trimmed gray suit and natty silver-buckled shoes; the curl-brimmed hat on the stand by the door had a snakeskin band and one peacock feather. A whiff of expensive cologne; just the overall ensemble that a moderately prosperous man-about-town was wearing this season.
“Anton,” Lefarge nodded. He continued the gesture to the civilian, raised an eyebrow. His superior caught the unspoken question: Who’s the suit?
“Brigadier, this is Operative Edward Forsymmes, Alliance Central Intelligence.”
Fucking joy. He is a suit. Still, this was no time to let the rivalry with the newer central-government agency interfere with business. San Francisco was capital of the Alliance, and the Alliance was sovereign. The OSS had been founded as an agency of the old American government; it was only natural that the Grand Senate wanted an intelligence source of its own. And the suits still couldn’t find their own arses with both hands on a dark night.
Lefarge extended his hand; the ACI agent rose and shook with a polished smile. There was strength in the grip; the man had a smooth, even tan, and no spare weight that the American could see; thinning blond hair combed over the bald spot, gray eyes.
“Jolly good to meet you,” he said pleasantly. British? Lefarge asked himself. No. Australasian; South Island, at a guess. Probably Tasmanian. A quarter of the British Isles had moved to the Australasian Federation over the past century, and the accents had not diverged all that much, especially in the Outer Islands. “Shall we proceed?”
The ACI man sat and clicked open his attaché case, pulling out a folder. It had an indigo border, Most Secret. An OSS code group for title; the New America designation. Lefarge shot an unbelieving glance at his commanding officer.
Donati shrugged, with a very Italian gesture. “The Chairman’s Office thought the Agency should be involved,” he said in a neutral tone.
Christ, Lefarge thought with well-hidden disgust. Not enough that San Francisco was getting involved, but the Agency and the Chairman’s office. The Chairman was all armchair bomb-them-aller, and the Agency was a band of would-be Machiavellis, and the two never agreed on anything—except to distrust the OSS.
“Well,” he said. “What’s the latest on the hijacking incident?”
Donati waved a hand to the civilians.
“Really, quite unfortunate,” the ACI man said. “Your boffins did say that this would be a controllable weapon, did they not?”
Lefarge flicked a cigarette out of his uniform jacket and glanced a question at Donati. “Sir?”
“Go ahead, Brigadier.”
“It’s largely controllable,” Lefarge explained patiently, thumbing his lighter. “Christ, though, look at what it has to penetrate! We’re trying to paralyze the whole Snake defensive system, not just one installation, you know. That means we have to get into the compinstruction sets when they’re embedded in the cores of central-brain units; then it has to jump the binary-analogue barrier repeatedly to spread to the other manufacturing centers where they burn-in cores. Talking sets here, not just data. Plus the continual checks they run against just this sort of thing; they’re not stupid.” He drew on the tobacco, snorted smoke from his nostrils. “One replication went a little off, and responded to a specific-applications attack command instead of the general-emergency one. If we could get more original copies into fabrication plants . . . What’ve we got on reaction?”
The Australasian tapped his finger on the file. “The SD are running around chopping off heads,” he said thoughtfully. “But rather less than we expected. It seems they had the beginnings of a tussle over those prisoners of ours they took in the hijacking, the usual War-Security thing they amuse themselves with . . . and then their top politicals stepped in. Closed everything down; shut off all investigation; had the core from the stingfighter they lost, and the prisoners, and the bodies, all shipped to Virunga Biocontrol. We did catch an unfamiliar code group; all we could crack was the outer title. Stone dogs, whatever that means.” He smiled at the two OSS officers. “You chappies wouldn’t be holding out on us, would you?”
Lefarge and Donati exchanged a glance.
“We’ve never gotten a handle on it,” Donati admitted. “The name’s cropped up”—he paused to consult the terminal in the desk—“five times, first time in 1973. Again in ’75, ’78, ’82. Then now, which is the first time in nearly a decade. It’s about the most closely held thing they’ve got, and all we can say firmly is that it’s fed to Virunga . . . which might mean something biological. Or might not.”
“Those damned Luddites!” the ACI man exclaimed. Donati and Lefarge nodded in a moment of perfect agreement; the antibiotech movement had crippled Alliance research for a generation. It was understandable, considering the uses to which the Draka had put the capabilities, but a weakness nonetheless.
“Still,” he went on musingly. “Why is that involved . . . when we know that it was our little surprise that caused the incident with the stingfighter?”
“Let’s put it this way,” Lefarge said grimly. “The Stone Dogs, whatever they are, are as closely held as . . . the Project. What’s the Project? Our ace in the hole. Now, what’s wrong with this picture?”
The agent winced slightly. “I say, bad show. Well, not our affair, what? There’s no compromise of the Project; they’ll go over that stingfighter’s core, but their standard search models won’t find a thing.” He thumbed through the file. “We are getting some interesting data, from the deep-cover agent with the Commandant of Aresopolis.” He laughed. “A deep-cover agent between the covers, eh? From the pillow talk, she must be fantastic—”
Lefarge was dimly aware of Donati wrestling him to a standstill, of the ACI man scrambling backward, snarling, with a hand inside his jacket.
“That’s my sister you’re talking about, you son of a bitch!” he shouted. Coming back to himself, shuddering, smelling the sudden reek of his own sweat.
Inch by inch, they relaxed. “Look, Fred,” Donati said. “He didn’t know, all he saw was a code description; he’s got no need to know, he wouldn’t know if you hadn’t blown up!”
“Right,” Lefarge said, shaking off the arm and straightening his jacket. Breathe. In. Out. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and split the package, wiping his face down with the scented cloth and sinking back into his chair.
“I apologize, Brigadier,” the ACI agent said.
“Accepted. You had any experience inside, Operative Forsymmes?” The other man shook his head. “Then don’t make comments about those who have to operate in the Snake farm. For your information, my sister was missing-in-action in India in ’75. She contacted the OSS again, on her own initiative. Twenty-four years in there!”