'But that's not really the point,' his father said, looking back at Benjamin. 'The people inside the Center were unavoidable collateral damage once he decided on Scorched Earth. But we're talking about a minimum of more than three dozen people—quite possibly a lot more—in a separate explosion he didn't have to set off.' Albrecht raised an eyebrow. 'Now do you see? Some compulsion had to drive McBryde to overcome his scruples. And if it wasn't vengeance, what was it? What Collin is suggesting is that once it became clear to McBryde that his plans to defect had been aborted and he was going to die, he saw to it that Zilwicki and Cachat died also—and before they got off-planet with whatever he might have given them. As a last act of . . . what would you call it, Collin? Patriotism seems a little silly.'
'More like . . . atonement, I think. Keep in mind that I can't prove any of this, Father. It's just my gut feeling. And, as I said, no one else on my team agrees with me.'
'Practically speaking, though, it doesn't really matter which explanation actually applies, does it?' Albrecht asked gently, almost compassionately.
'No, Sir. It doesn't,' Collin agreed a bit softly.
'And the Park explosion?'
'That one's still something of a puzzle,' Collin confessed, and his eyes darkened once more. 'I don't like admitting that, either, given how many of my neighbors were killed. The current casualty total for that one is around eight thousand, though, and I'm damned sure Jack McBryde didn't have anything to do with that! At the same time, I don't think I believe somebody would just 'coincidentally' pick that particular day to set off a nuclear charge in a completely separate, spontaneous terrorist incident.'
'So you think they're related?'
'Father, I'm sure they have to be related somehow. We just don't know how. And we don't know—and will never know—who actually detonated the damned thing. We've got the feed transmitted from those two cops' HD cams, but neither camera ever had a good angle on the driver's face, so there's no way we can tell if whoever it was was ever in our files. Or, perhaps, I should say in our surviving files.' His smile could have curdled milk. 'It's possible—even probable—he was Ballroom affiliated, but we can't prove that. I'm inclined to think he was a seccy, not a slave, but that's really as far as I am prepared to go.'
He shrugged, much more lightly—obviously—than he actually felt.
'What I don't understand, even assuming he was Ballroom connected, is why. I'm assuming that, with Zilwicki's own Ballroom connections, he was receiving support from assets of theirs here on Mesa, as well. We keep them prunded far enough back that they don't have a truly effective presence—or we think we do, at any rate; what happened with Jack could prove we've been a little over sanguine in that respect. But even pruned back, they've always had some contacts among the seccies, and I think we have to take it for a given that Zilwicki had tapped into them for assistance once he got here. So my first hypotheses was that this was intended as a diversion for his and Cachat's escape. And,' his eyes hardened and his voice went grim, 'it would have made one hell of a diversion. Eight thousand dead and another sixty-three hundred badly injured?' He shook his head. 'It had every emergency responder in the city—and from Mendel, too, for that matter!—racing in one direction, and you couldn't have asked for a better diversion than that.
'But when I really considered it, I realized it wasn't Zilwicki's style. He could have achieved the same diversionary effect with an explosion that wouldn't have killed a fraction of as many people as this bomb killed. Not only that, but we know from his record that he had a soft spot a kilometer-wide where kids were concerned. Just look at the two be carted home with him from Old Chicago!' Collin shook his head again, harder. 'No way would that man have signed off on detonating a nuke in the middle of a frigging park on a Saturday morning. Cachat, now—he was cold enough he could have done it if he decided he had no choice, but I don't see even him going along with something like this purely for the sake of a diversion.'
'Do you have any theory at all that might explain it?'
'The best one I've been able to come up with, and it's no more than my own personal hypothesis, you understand, is that some Ballroom associate or sympathizer here on Mesa who was at least peripherally aware of Zilwicki and Cachat's presence, did it on his own. Given the fact that we know from Irvine that they clearly had an emergency fallback plan—the one that, unfortunately for them, took them too close to Jack's little surprise at Buenaventura—I think they may have intended for the Park Valley nuke to go off somewhere else, somewhere with a lot less people around. Somewhere it would have made a diversion but not killed so many people. But once Jack took them out at Buenaventura, whoever was in charge . . . changed his mind. In other words, the charge itself probably was part of Zilwicki and Cachat's escape plan, but I doubt very much that its location was.'
Albrecht leaned back in his chair folded his hands across his chest, and spent the next several minutes looking out the window at white beaches and dark blue water while he thought it all through.
'Well,' he said finally, grimacing a little. 'I'd be happier if there weren't so many loose ends. But'—he brought his eyes back to his two sons—'the bottom line is that the one thing that does seem to be definitely established is that all four of the really dangerous people involved are dead. McBryde himself, Simões, Cachat, and Zilwicki. And, of course,' his eyes hardened slightly, 'the one ultimately responsible for this debacle.'
Collin faced his father squarely.
'I assume you mean the Isabel,' he said. His father gave a small nod, and Collin grimaced. 'I think that's an unfair assessment, Father. Quite unfair, in fact. I don't think anyone could have foreseen that Jack McBryde was going to turn traitor. I can tell you that I didn't finally accept the truth for almost two full days, and I had the advantage of a lot of data Isabel never got a chance to see. She reacted as quickly as anyone could have asked when she found out he was behaving . . . erratically. And, in my opinion, she acted appropriately, given what she could havve known or understood at the time. There'd been absolutely no earlier indication that Jack, of all people, could have become a security risk. And don't forget, we didn't identify Zilwicki from Irvine's bugs' imagery until after the smoke had cleared. There's no evidence that Isabel imagined for one moment that Jack had been talking to Anton Zilwicki. Or that she had any reason to suspect anything of the sort, for that matter! All she knew at that point was that one of our most senior security officers, with a faultless record, in charge of one of the three most important installations on Mesa itself, had apparently decided to follow up Irvine's reports on his own.
'After the fact, knowing what we know now, it's obvious to us that she should've ordered his immediate arrest and launched a full bore investigation. But that's being wise after the fact, Father. No, it didn't immediately cross her mind that he was planning on betraying the entire Alignment, and maybe it should have. But given what she knew, she reacted immediately, and, frankly, she did exactly what I would have done in her place.
'The truth is, Father, that if Isabel were still alive and you were proposing to punish her, I'd be pointing out that by any logic and reason, you ought to be punishing me at the same time.'
For a moment, father and son locked gazes. Then Albrecht looked away. A little smile came to his face, and he might have murmured, 'Like father, like son,' but neither Collin nor Benjamin knew for sure.
When his gaze came back, though, it was still hard, still purposeful.
'Am I right in assuming that you don't propose to punish McBryde's family?' he asked.
'No. We have no reason to think any of them were involved. None. Oh, we've questioned them, of course, thoroughly, and it's obvious they're deeply distraught and grieving. Defensive, too. I think they're in denial, to some extent, but I also think that's inevitable. What I haven't seen is any evidence that any of them knew a thing about Jack's plans. And, frankly, I'm positive Jack would never have involved them. Not in something like this, whatever his own motives may have been, he'd never have put his parents, Zachariah, or his sisters at risk. Not in a million years.'
'Lathorous?'
'Steve doesn't seem to have been involved either, except by accident. And even then, only tangentially. It's true he was Jack's friend, but so are a lot of people.' Collin grimaced. 'Hell, Father, I liked Jack McBryde—a lot. Most people did.'
'So you propose no punishment?'
