Torch of Freedom

Chapter Seven

'I don't mean to sound skeptical,' said Jeremy X, sounding skeptical. 'But are you sure you're not all just suffering from a case of EIS?' He pronounced the acronym phonetically.

Princess Ruth looked puzzled. 'What's 'Ice'?'

'EIS. Stands for Excessive Intelligence Syndrome,' said Anton Zilwicki. 'Also known in the Office of Naval Intelligence as Hall of Mirrors Fever.'

'In State Sec, we called it Spyrot,' said Victor Cachat. 'The term's carried over into the FIS, too.'

Ruth shifted the puzzled look to Jeremy. 'And what is that supposed to mean?'

'It's a reasonable question, Princess,' said Anton. 'I've spent quite a few hours pondering the possibility myself.'

'So have I,' said Cachat. 'In fact, it's the first thing I thought of, when I started re-examining what I knew —or thought I knew—about Manpower. It wouldn't be the first time that spies outsmarted themselves by seeing more than was actually there.' He glanced at Zilwicki. ' 'Hall of Mirrors Fever,' eh? I hadn't heard that before, but it's certainly an apt way of putting it.'

'In our line of work, Ruth,' said Anton, 'we usually can't see things directly. What we're really doing is looking for reflections. Have you ever been in a hall of mirrors at an amusement park?'

Ruth nodded.

'Then you'll know what I mean when I say it's easy to get snared in a cascade of images that are really just reflections of themselves. Once a single false conclusion or assumption gets itself planted in a logic train, it goes right on generating more and more false images.'

'Fine, but . . .' Ruth shook head. The gesture expressed more in the way of confusion than disagreement. 'I don't see that as any kind of significant factor in this case. I mean, we're dealing with internal correspondence between people within Mesa Pharmaceuticals itself. That seems pretty straightforward to me.' A bit plaintively: 'Not a mirror in sight.'

'No?' said Cachat, smiling thinly. 'How do we know the person on the other end of this correspondence, back on Mesa'—he glanced down at the reader in his hand, then did a quick scan back through the report—'Dana Wedermeyer, her name was—'

'Could be a 'he,' actually,' interrupted Anton. 'Dana's one of those unisex names that ought to be banned on pain of death, seeing as how they create nothing but grief for hardworking spies.'

Cachat and kept going. 'How do we know that she or he was working for Mesa Pharmaceuticals?'

'Oh, come on, Victor,' protested Ruth. 'I can assure you that I double-checked and cross-checked all of that. There's no question at all that the correspondence we dug out of the files came from Pharmaceuticals' headquarters on Mesa.'

'I don't doubt it,' said Victor. 'But you're misunderstand my point. How do we know that the person sending these from Pharmaceuticals' headquarters was actually working for Pharmaceuticals?'

Ruth looked cross-eyed. A bit cross, too. 'Who the hell else would be sitting there but a Pharmaceuticals employee? Or high-level manager, rather, since there's no way a low-level flunky was sending back instructions like those.'

Anton sighed. 'You're still missing his point, Ruth—which is one I should have thought of myself, right away.'

He looked around for someplace to sit. They'd been having this discussion in Jeremy's office in the government complex, which was quite possibly the smallest office used by a planetary-level 'Minister of War' anywhere in the inhabited galaxy. There were only two chairs in the office, placed right in front of Jeremy's desk. Ruth was in one, Victor in the other. Jeremy himself was perched on a corner of his desk.

The desk, at least, was big. It seemed to fill half the room. Jeremy leaned over and cleared away the small mound of papers covering another corner of his desk with a quick and agile motion. Barely more than a flick of the wrist. 'Here, Anton,' he said, smiling. 'Have a seat.'

'Thanks.' Zilwicki perched himself on the desk corner, with one foot still on the floor, half-supporting his weight. 'What he's getting at, Ruth, is that while it's certainly true that this Dana Wedermeyer person was employed by Mesa Pharmaceuticals, how do we know who he was really working for? It's possible that he—or she, damn these stupid names and what's wrong with proper names like Ruth and Cathy and Anton and Victor?—had been suborned and was really working for Manpower .'

He pointed to the electronic memo pad in the princess's hand. 'That would explain everything in that correspondence.'

Ruth looked down at the pad. Frowning, as if she was seeing it for the first time and wasn't entirely sure what it was. 'That seems a lot more unlikely to me than any other explanation. I mean, presumably Pharmaceuticals maintains some sort of supervision over its employees, even at management levels.'

Victor Cachat sat a bit straighter in his chair, using a hand on one of the armchairs to prop himself up enough to look over at the display of Ruth's pad. 'Oh, I don't think it's all that likely myself, Your Highness.'

She turned her head to glare at him. 'What? Are you going to start on me now, too, with the fancy titles?'

Anton had to suppress a smile. Just a few months ago, Ruth's attitude toward Victor Cachat had been one of hostility, kept in check by the needs of the moment but still sharp and—he was sure the princess would have insisted at the time—quite unforgiving. Now . . .

Once in a while, she'd remember that Cachat was not only a Havenite enemy in the abstract but was specifically the enemy agent who'd stood aside—no, worse, manipulated the situation—when her entire security contingent had been gunned down by Masadan fanatics. At such times, she'd become cold and uncommunicative toward him for two or three days at a time.

But, most of the time, the 'needs of the moment' had undergone the proverbial sea change. Cachat had been present on Torch almost without interruption since the planet had been taken from Manpower, Inc. And, willy-nilly, since she was the assistant director of intelligence for the new star nation—Anton himself was the temporary director, until a permanent replacement could be found—she'd been working very closely with the Havenite ever since. Of course, Victor never divulged anything that might in any way compromise the Republic of Haven. But, that aside, he'd been extremely helpful to the young woman. In his own way—quite different way—he'd probably been as much of a tutor for her as Anton himself.

Well . . . not exactly. The problem was that Cachat's areas of expertise were things that Ruth could grasp intellectually but probably couldn't carry out herself, in the field. Not well, certainly.

Unlike Ruth and Anton, Cachat was not a tech weenie. He was adept enough with computers, but he had none of Zilwicki or the Manticoran princess's wizardry with them. And while he was an excellent analyst, he was no better than Anton himself. Probably not as good, actually, push came to shove—although they were both operating on a rarified height that precious few other spies in the galaxy could reach to begin with.

Victor's greater age and much greater experience meant that he was still a better intelligence analyst than Ruth, but Anton didn't think that superiority would last more than a few years. The princess really did have a knack for the often peculiar and sometimes downright bizarre world of the aptly-named Hall of Mirrors.

But Cachat's real forte was field work. There, Anton thought he was in a league of his own. There might be a handful of secret agents in the galaxy as good as Victor was in that area, but that would be it—a literal handful. And none of them would be any better.

Anton Zilwicki himself was not one of that theoretical handful, and he knew it. To be sure, he was very good. In terms of fieldcraft, as most people understood the term, he was probably even as good as Victor. Very close, at least.

But he simply didn't have Cachat's mindset. The Havenite agent was a man so certain in his convictions and loyalties, and so certain of himself, that he could behave in a crisis like no one Anton had ever encountered. He would react faster than anyone and be more ruthless than anyone, if he thought ruthlessness was what was