Both Elena and Opal sat up ramrod straight. “You wouldn’t—”
“In short,” Downing finished, “we need you, Trevor.”
For a moment, Trevor just stared, then he blinked. “I am exactly the wrong person to send. We—Caine and I—have a personal bond of honor with Darzhee Kut. After what we went through together, he trusts that neither of us would ever—”
“Which is exactly why it must be you, Trevor,” pressed Richard. “Not only because Darzhee Kut and his leaders know you from the Convocation and from your time in the Arat Kur fleet, but because you and he had to create an unusual bond just in order to survive. His confidence in you—and by extension, the Arat Kurs’ confidence in you—is exactly the edge we need: a blind-spot, a chink in their armor, which we can exploit to get in and strike them when and where they least expect it. And when and where it will do us the most good.” Downing paused, saw that logic alone would not win Trevor over. There needed to be a personal, an emotional, compulsion as well. “Trevor, you are absolutely indispensable to the success of this mission, and that isn’t just my assessment. It was, indirectly, your father’s, as well.”
“Dad’s? How?”
“He was the one who first saw the value of Caine’s plan, not me. And he seemed to know it might require just this kind of trickery, even duplicity, to retake our planet. No matter the personal costs.”
Downing saw Trevor’s eyes waver and his face pinch in what looked like some agony of entrapment. Richard glanced quickly toward Elena and Opal. “This might be a good moment to leave, ladies. The topics are going to move into the ‘need to know’ realm quite soon.”
“Sure,” Opal sneered. “It’s not like you’re trying to clear the room before exerting more emotional thumbscrews.” She looked away in disgust.
“Not true,” Downing lied. “And we’ll soon need to plan your part of the mission as well, Major Patrone.”
Opal snorted. “Yeah, I can hardly wait.”
“Actually, Major Patrone, your phase of the operation must commence before Trevor’s.”
“Oh? Will I also be using my diplomatic credentials to sucker punch someone?”
“No, Major. Your mission does not involve infiltration, but extraction.”
“Extraction? Of whom?” And then her eyes opened wide. “Caine! But he’s not planetside, as far as we know.”
“Not yet, but given his role at Convocation, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the Arat Kur bring him to Jakarta. It would be almost inevitable, if we agreed to send our ‘negotiators’ there.”
She frowned. “Okay—but why extract him? No matter what happens, he’s protected by his diplomatic credentials, isn’t—?” And then the realization hit her. “Oh. So, before your killer-emissaries violate the basic principles of diplomatic privilege with a mass assassination, I have to get our real diplomat out. Because our enemies will probably not feel disposed to make targeting distinctions between genuine and fake diplomats after Trevor and his pals start pulling their triggers.”
“Yes, that pretty much sums it up, Major.”
“Which means, if I don’t find and extract Caine in time, there’s an excellent chance that some exosapient invader, or megacorporate quisling, or killer clone is going to put a bullet in his brain. Just on general principles.”
Downing put down his stylus. “It is a distinct possibility.”
Opal became very red, stood, pointed a quivering finger at Downing, opened her mouth—but then abruptly turned and was out the door in five angry strides.
Elena watched Opal go, waited until the outer door banged closed, and then rose. She looked at her brother as if she were hugging him with her eyes, and then turned a blank gaze upon Downing. “‘And on Earth, peace and good will to all men,’ That is the customary greeting of the season, isn’t it, Uncle Richard?” She gathered up her things and left without a word or backward glance.
Trevor’s voice pulled Downing’s attention away from the twice-closed office door. “I can’t be your lead operative on Case Timber Pony, Richard. I’m a soldier—not a liar.”
“Trevor, this is war, and its first casualty is personal choice. And right now, we have to do anything that helps us survive. See here, I’ve done—and continue to do—terrible things. I won’t evade or deny that. But who else is going to do them? Oh, I’m sure there were a thousand people who had the skills to do just as well as—or a damned sight better than—me, but when your father reached into the hat of fate, it was me that he pulled up by the ears. Just as fate pulled him up when he found that the Doomsday Rock was a weapon aimed at Earth. And now fate has tapped you on the shoulder.” When Trevor didn’t respond, Downing felt himself growing genuinely desperate. “Do you think we wanted this for you? Do you think we wanted this for us?”
Trevor still did not look at him. “I think you made a choice to keep on doing this job when you could have walked away.”
“How could we walk away from what we knew about the threat to our families, our planet? How could we walk away from responding to that threat, from a job that had—had—to be done? Who were we supposed to give it to? We couldn’t even tell anyone else what we knew. Would’ve made job interviews a tad difficult, don’t you think? And, even if we could have passed the poison cup to someone else, just what poor sod should we have saddled with this lifelong nightmare? By what right would we have chosen some other human being to sacrifice their happiness and freedom of mind so that we could have some of our own back?
“Not that we would have rested any easier, mind you. I can see it now: Richard and Nolan at the joint family barbecue, grilling shrimp, looking up at the stars, and hoping that the shop in DC was in good hands and that Earth itself wasn’t on someone’s interstellar dinner menu.”
Trevor’s eyes came back up; they were narrow, bitter. “Yeah, paint me some more scenes of your personal sacrifices, Uncle Richard. They sure make me feel better. They sure do bring my father back to life. And bring back all the hours, days, weeks he could have been with me instead of off saving the world with you, halfway around the globe.”
Downing felt his fingers and feet grow very cold, his stomach sink. In the mirroring glass door that separated the conference room from the inner office, his pallor was unnatural, as if he had aged a decade in the last ten minutes. He sat heavily. “I’ve tried to shield you from what I could. God knows I had little enough success at it, but I tried. But this time, it’s out of my hands. By Executive Order, Case Timber Pony is now in its final phase of preparation and we are committed to executing it. We might lose the war if we do not. So, I’m sorry, Trevor, but this time—this one time—you will receive orders that will require you to lie.”
Trevor pushed back from the table; his tone of voice had gone much further. “And when shall I expect those orders, sir?”
Downing waved a weak hand. “That’s not clear. There’s a bit of diplomatic dancing to be done with the Arat Kur first, obviously. We’ll begin assembling the mission force while that’s going on, and we’ll send the primary operation orders—as well as contingency plans—down to Nevis.”
Trevor nodded. “Is that where you’ve stashed Stosh, Rulaine, and the rest of the security team you had me leading on Mars?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m to use them on this op?”
“Yes, but not officially. The official force rosters are being compiled by Commonwealth JSOC and the intel chiefs. They’re not up to me. Not except your group. Which will not show up on the standard table of organization. We’ll reserve your team as our own ace in the hole, so to speak. In case the main plan is called off and you have to use one of the contingencies that involve breaching the enemy compound from the outside.”