The Lotus Eaters

while. There was a Maracaiban fishing trawler about thirty miles from where the Gallic frigate went down. It heard the automatic distress signal and went in to assist. The Gauls sank it before it could get close. Maybe they thought it was a Q ship. Anyway, big stink around the whole of Colombia Latina.'

'How are they explaining away the lost frigate?' Chu asked.

'They're not. Their story is that it was an unprovoked attack by us. Our story is that it was an unprovoked attack by them to which our sub responded in self defense.'

'It was,' Chu said.

'I know,' Carrera agreed, 'but—'

'—but,' Fernandez finished, 'since you're the only one who can prove that, and since, officially, you weren't anywhere near there . . .'

'It doesn't really matter, anyway,' said Carrera. 'People who want to believe our story would, even if they had proof of the Gauls' version of events. People who want to believe the Gauls would, even if I had you swear to them on a stack of bibles that they fired first. There's so much information these days, and so much of it is conflicting, that people have grown jaded and simply believe whatever their prejudices tell them to. Hell, language itself is losing its ability to inform or persuade . . . or even to communicate.'

Chu scratched his head through long-unwashed hair. 'Yeah.'

He then remembered something he'd been wanting to tell Carrera and Fosa for days. 'There at the end, sirs, there's something happened you need to know about.'

'What's that?' Fosa asked.

Chu's voice was full of admiration as he said, 'Toward the end, Orca put on a burst of speed to try to evade some of the torpedoes coming for it.'

Fosa shrugged. Yeah? So?

'Well . . . Quijana apparently turned on his clicker when he upped his speed.'

This time it was Carrera who shrugged, while Fosa's face was lit by a smile.

Fernandez understood, too, being a man who worked with secrets. 'He kept the secret,' he explained to Carrera. 'He kept it at the cost—certainly the risk—of his life.'

Fernandez ahemed. 'Speaking of secrets, Patricio, if you don't mind, I've got to go look into something in Ciudad Balboa.'

Building 59, Fort Muddville, Transitway Area, Balboa

In theory, Legate Pigna was on leave. In fact, he'd gone into the jungle with a fishing pole and a small pack, come out somewhere else without the pole and in disguise, then been picked up and whisked to Janier's headquarters for final coordination. It was the fourteenth meeting concerning the pressing matter of getting rid of Carrera since Pigna had attended the first at the Hotel Rustico.

The legate emerged from the unmarked, Tauran Union-owned sedan in the shadows under the arched entrance to the main quadrangle. De Villepin met him there, and hustled him through a door that led to stairs that, in turn, led directly to Janier's office suite, bypassing even the General's secretary. This was to the good as de Villepin was beginning to develop some doubts about that one. That she was passing on information to someone, he had no doubt of. But whether that someone was his opposite number, Fernandez, Wallis, the Ambassador from the Federated States, or someone in the office of Rocaberti, the rump president, he couldn't say and hadn't been able to discover. It was even vaguely possible that the woman was reporting back to some one or another of the unelected bureaucrats who ran the Tauran Union. Worst of all was the possibility that she was reporting to the Gallic Navy, but de Villepin considered this somewhat unlikely.

A representative of Rocaberti's office was waiting for Pigna, when he arrived, as was Arias, the senior of the policemen that still reported to the old president, and another man he didn't know at all but who was introduced as Janier's Staff Judge Advocate, Commandant Boissieu.

At Janier's hand wave, de Villepin began, 'The worst part of our little program is that everyone is to a greater or lesser extent infiltrated and compromised. Thus, anything we may plan or do beyond the simplest is likely to tip our hand well before we are ready. It goes almost without saying—but I will say it, anyway—that if we are discovered beforehand it could be a disaster for everyone.

'Fortunately, our opponents are about as well infiltrated as we are and I can say with considerable confidence that none of Carrera's people knows as of yet that we are planning to depose him and Parilla.'

'How do you know that, de Villepin?' Janier asked.

'I know it,' the intelligence officer replied, 'because Fernandez's deputy is on our payroll and his secretary cum mistress—Barletta's I mean, not Fernandez's—likewise reports to me. Something of this magnitude, if known, would have sent ripples all through their force. Of ripples, other than those explainable by other events, there has been not a one.'

'Nobody knows about my part, outside of ourselves,' Pigna insisted. 'And I know this because I have taken no one into my confidence. Every order has been prepared by myself. Except for a couple of close relatives I will inform only at the end, my men will think they are following Carrera's orders, passed on through me . . . for as long as that illusion holds. Speaking of which . . .'

'I have the team ready to seize Carrera,' the policeman said. 'All composed of men who hate his very guts, some are veterans of his legions who either left under a cloud or feel cheated in some way. They have been trained by the Gauls as a hostage rescue force. There is little difference between a hostage rescue force and a kidnapping force.' The policeman looked directly at Boissieu and asked, 'Do you have the warrants?'

The lawyer nodded, replying, 'Not only the old ones from the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Pashtia and Sumer, but also new ones from the Global Court of Justice for both men for participation in narcotrafficking.'

'That's important,' Janier said, 'because while the Federated States, even under the Progressives, is fairly unsympathetic to the war crimes issue, they are death on drug running. You will produce evidence of drug running?'