“Despicable,” said Levin. “If the evidence is genuine.”

Bannson said, “It’s the real deal, all right. Crow pulled off a first-class cover-up, but once you’ve got hold of the first loose end”—he indicated the paperback book, a popular war memoir by a Capellan novelist who’d been a CapCon intelligence officer in his youth, with its reference to a young man named Daniel Peterson who had betrayed his homeworld of Liao to the Capellans—“you can track down independent confirmation for everything else without much trouble. Name any set of events you care to. They’ll verify.”

“I think somebody else did track them down,” Tara said. “I can’t imagine anything besides blackmail that would make him turn traitor again after all this time. And with so much to lose.”

Bannson shrugged. “What can I say? Once the information is out there, it’s out there. He probably never expected this guy to start telling war stories.”

“And I never expected to be presented with all of this,” she said. “What’s your stake, Mr. Bannson?”

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “Ezekiel Crow’s been standing in the way of my business plans for quite a while, and when I heard rumors about what he did on Northwind, I decided that the two of us had a problem in common—for now, at least. Just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about making any long-term alliances.”

“I think we all understand that,” Jonah Levin said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a data disc. So his man Horn recovered it after all, Tara thought. He certainly was taking his time about letting me know. “In the interests of sharing information—I assume there’s a data reader in the room somewhere?”

“In the armoire, along with the tri-vid screen,” Tara said absently, before Bannson could reply.

Bannson didn’t say anything, only took the data disc from Levin and set it up to play. Tara knew a moment’s panicky fear that bad luck had struck her again and it would turn out to be nothing but popular music or children’s cartoons—but it was the Northwind file, with all the information intact, exactly as she’d sent it with Owain Jones. By the time it had finished playing, Jacob Bannson was grinning through his beard.

“Oh, yeah.” For a moment, his voice lost all its expensive polish and was pure low-class St. Andre. “Between the old stuff and this, we have got the man laid out on toast for breakfast.”

Tara said to Levin, “When do you think we should present it to the Exarch?”

“You don’t,” Bannson said at once. “You hand it over to the tri-vids and let them run with it. After that, it won’t matter what the Exarch thinks. He’s done for.”

“Paladin Levin?” Tara said again.

Jonah Levin was looking thoughtfully at the last image on the data disc—the pair of battle-weary young troopers who’d manned the checkpoint on Northwind.

“Give the information to the Exarch,” he said. “There’ll have to be a formal inquiry. But give a copy to the tri-vids first.”

28

Hotel Duquesne

Geneva, Terra

Prefecture X

April 3134; local spring

Captain Tara Bishop took the Countess of Northwind’s suggestion, and found herself a spot in the hotel bar from which she could keep an eye on the main lobby while she waited on events taking place above. Just another episode in the exciting life of a Prefect’s aide, she thought. Lucky me.

Under the circumstances, she couldn’t help remembering the Colonel she’d served under on Addicks, back in the time—far off now, even if not quite a full year had elapsed between that day and this—when all she had to worry about was intermittent local skirmishing between the Highlanders and the Dragon’s Fury, instead of the Steel Wolves and the fate of Terra. She hadn’t wanted to leave off soldiering in the field in order to serve as Tara Campbell’s aide-de-camp, and her Colonel had needed to give her a stern and fatherly lecture on the proper care and feeding of a good career.

Promising young officers—by which, it seemed, he meant her—should listen to their superiors and go where they were posted, especially when the new assignment offered them a chance to gain valuable experience and make useful political connections.

“If you’re aiming for the top,” he’d finished, “you need to know what it looks like up there first.”

So far, she thought, the main descriptive term that came to mind was “expensive.” The bottles drawn up in ranks on the shelf behind the bar included a full platoon, at least, of genuine Terran whiskeys, most of them old enough to bear arms in The Republic and a good half dozen of them older than she was. She pulled out a twenty-stone note and laid it on the bar. The bartender came over.

“I’ll have the Glen Grant,” she said.

“Will that be the twenty-five year old, or the fifty?”

What the hell, she thought. I’m not likely to have another chance any time soon. “The fifty.”

The twenty-stone note went away, and the bartender came back a few minutes later with a heavy paper bar coaster, a crystal tumbler full of amber liquid, and a handful of small coins.

Expensive was the word, all right, she thought. She took a careful sip. But worth it.

She settled down to make the shot of Glen Grant last until the Countess finished her meeting upstairs. At this late hour on a weeknight, there was only one other customer in the bar, a plain man in a plain suit, apparently no more inclined to chat than she was—and, like her, watching the lobby as he drank.

Popular hobby around here, she thought. In fact, the bar was situated admirably for keeping tabs on the comings and goings of the hotel guests. Tara wondered if the Duquesne’s architect had designed it that way on purpose, for the convenience of spies, aides-de-camp, and flunkies in general.

This is Geneva, she reminded herself. Anything is possible.

Lobby watching might have been the bar’s main attraction, but the management appeared willing to give at least a nod to the traditions. There was a discreet tri-vid box on the back counter, tucked underneath the shelves full of bottles, small enough that the figures moving around inside it appeared as dollhouse-size miniatures.

Captain Bishop, as usual, found the display annoying. It was bad enough to have to watch entertainers shrunk down to the size of her thumb, but the news stories were even worse. Something in Bishop’s mind balked at the idea of taking real people and their real pain and happiness and dirt and calamity, and turning them into bright little toys.

I’d sooner have a flat-screen video wall, she grumbled to herself. If anybody even makes those anymore.

Perversely, her irritation only helped the tri-vid box draw her attention even more. It was a news channel, too. Winter sports scores, for hockey and curling. I didn’t know they played that on Terra, she thought, I always believed we invented it on Northwind. And the weather: a warming trend over western Europe, storms in the North Sea, the possibility of a thaw in Russia. That wasn’t good. She had no illusions about what the terrain around Belgorod was going to be like when the ice melted in the frozen ground.

The top of the hour came around again, and the breaking news, read by a bland-faced announcer whose head and shoulders filled most of the box. Captain Bishop had read a story once, when she was a little girl, about a witch who kept a closet full of different heads, and tri-vid newsreaders always made her think about that. The book had given her nightmares for weeks.

The volume on the box was kept low; it took almost a full minute for the announcer’s words to penetrate into her awareness.

“New details coming in from the jump point space station on the identity of the unknown ship that emerged several hours ago: DropShips are disengaging and setting course for Terra. These ships have likewise refused to identify themselves…”