Victor looked uncomfortable again. "Well . . . yes. But there's a lot of latitude involved." More brightly: "And they've sent out a very competent subordinate. I'm sure she can handle things while I'm gone."

"And just how can you be so certain she's that good?"

"Oh, we've worked together before, Jeremy, on La Martine. She did a superb job of organizing the murder of a rogue StateSec officer, and handled the beating I gave her afterward just about as well." Seeing the stares, he added: "Well, I had to have her beaten. Only way to cover her tracks. I learned that from Kevin Usher, the time he beat me to a pulp in Chicago."

He rose from the table. "And now that we're settled on our course of action—even though most of you don't actually know what it is—I've got to start planning our entry into Mesa. Anton and Ruth still have a lot of data-crunching to do, but they don't really need my help. That sort of thing is, ah, not my forte."

Du Havel saw that Berry was now looking cross-eyed. It was hard not to laugh. He was quite sure he knew what the young queen was thinking.

Sure isn't. Victor Cachat's forte is mayhem.

Chapter Thirty-Four

"Are you sure about this, Victor?" asked Jeremy. "It's a hell of risky way for you to try to get onto Mesa."

He gave Victor's companion a glance that was not quite skeptical, but close. "And—meaning no offense, Yana—but adding you to this small team seems to me to increase the risk, not lower it."

The ex-Scrag Amazon gave the war secretary a cool smile in return. A bit hastily, he added: "Not because I doubt your loyalties, you understand. It's just . . ."

He chuckled softly. "I will say, Victor, if you pull this off you'll have raised the bar for chutzpah about a meter."

"Who Hutspa?" asked Berry.

"Miguel Jutspa," said Ruth. "Spelled with a 'J,' not an 'H.' He's a leader of the Renaissance League, one of Jessica Stein's close advisers."

Web Du Havel smiled. "I think Anton's actually using a Yiddish term, Ruth."

"What's—"

"Ancient dialect of German used by Jews. 'Chutzpah'—it actually starts with a 'ch'—means . . ." His eyes got a little unfocused. "There's no exact translation. It's a wonderful term, really. The closest would be brazen, brash—but with the connotation of breath-taking self-righteousness as well. A good illustration is the old joke about the man who murdered his parents for the inheritance and then, when caught and convicted, argued that he should get a light sentence because he'd been deprived of parental guidance. That's chutzpah."

Berry looked back and forth between Victor and Yana. "All right, I can see that. Victor and Yana go in as a couple, pretending to be among the very few survivors of the Manpower Incident on Terra—the only StateSec agent and one of the few Scrags who somehow managed to keep from getting slaughtered by the murderous alliance between the Ballroom, Kevin Usher—now the head of Haven's FIS—and a certain then-completely-unknown StateSec agent by the name of . . . Victor Cachat."

"Look at this way," said Victor. "If anybody presses me, I can give them details about the episode that they've never heard, but which will ring absolutely true."

Anton laughed softly. "Since, in fact, there were no survivors of that StateSec unit—except you." He looked at Yana. "And it's almost certain that no one has an exact record of exactly which Scrags were killed in Chicago. Some did survive, after all. So why not you?"

Ruth looked a bit uncertain. "I don't know . . . It would seem to me that there's a risk there. If there were so few Scrag survivors of that incident—and there aren't all that many Scrags in the universe to begin with—isn't there a chance that one of the real survivors will know that Yana wasn't among them? Of course, that's assuming she runs into any such on Mesa, which is probably not likely. Still, it's a risk."

Yana shook her head. "You don't really understand how Scrag society works, Ruth. The level of what you might call internal belligerence is closer to that of predators than humans. It wouldn't be at all surprising if I'd gotten irritated with other Scrags and gone my own way. And, as it happens, I did spend a fair amount of time on Terra in my younger days, most of it in Chicago. A lot of Scrags do, though, so I'd hardly stand out."

She looked at Berry. And, for an instant, might have seemed a tiny bit embarrassed. "I even—just for a short time—had a fling with one of the Scrags who was involved—several years later, you understand, I was long gone by then—in your sister's kidnapping."

Berry put her hand over her mouth, stifling laughter. "Wait'll I tell Helen!"

"I'd just as soon you didn't. No reason to bother, anyway. That particular ex-boyfriend ranks close to the bottom on my long list of ex-boyfriends whose memory I hold in cheerful contempt."

She bestowed an approving look upon Victor. "Not that I'm holding a grudge, seeing as how Victor eventually blew the bastard apart with a flechette gun."

Victor smiled politely in return, the way someone smiles when they're thanked for having done a minor favor in times past. Held open a door in the rain, lent someone a small amount of money, butchered an ex-lover, that sort of thing.

"To get back to the point," he said, "unless someone very high up in Mesan security gets involved, there's really not much chance that anyone will see through the charade. In the nature of things, StateSec saw to it that there were no records of me readily available. No vids, no images, no DNA records, nothing. They were methodical about that to the point of mania, especially during the Saint-Just years. So unless I meet someone on Mesa who actually worked with me in StateSec, I'm not running that much risk. And the chance of that happening is quite low, because . . . well . . ."

"You didn't leave too many survivors," said Ruth sweetly.

"That's one way of putting it, I suppose."

Berry had been frowning. "Victor, what did you mean when you said 'unless someone very high up in Mesan security gets involved'?"

They'd been meeting, as usual, in the deeply-buried operations chamber which now also served as Berry and Ruth's living quarters. Looking at his adopted daughter, Anton had to suppress an urge to grin for perhaps the tenth time since the meeting had started. There was something just plain comical about the very young Queen of Torch officially presiding over a meeting . . . while sitting in a lotus position on top of her bed.

There wasn't much choice, though. The addition of Saburo and now Yana to the inner circle had crowded the seats at the conference table to the point where both Ruth and Berry found it more comfortable to perch on their beds—which wasn't hard, of course, since the beds were jammed up against the table.

As the operations center for which it had been designed, the buried chamber had seemed perfectly roomy. Now that it had to double much of the time as the effective seat of a planet's government, it no longer did.

"What he means," said Anton, "is that we have to assume that even given the incredibly low profile Victor's maintained over the years, Manpower—or whoever's really running the show on Mesa—will by now have gotten enough to be able to identify him. If one of their own top agents spots him. But the odds that they've spread that information widely, even among their own ranks, is low."

"Why?" asked Ruth. "I'd think that's the first thing they'd do."

Thandi Palane smiled, and shook her head. "That's because you've been an individualist your whole life, Ruth—even when your membership in the Winton dynasty enabled you to shoehorn yourself into a central position as an of-fi-cial spy."

Ruth frowned. "Which means . . . what?"