Changer of Worlds

Because I think they’re full of shit.

But he didn’t speak the words. He simply gave Lady Catherine a friendly smile. “I don’t mind, ma’am. Curse all you want.”

He planted his hands on his knees. His hands, like his face and body, were square and blunt. “But I’m telling you, the ambassador and the admiral—and Admiral Young’s whole little flock of armchair intelligence advisers—”

He couldn’t resist: “—are full of shit.”

All traces of humor vanished. “My daughter was not kidnapped by the Peeps. Or, if she was, it’s some kind of black operation being done completely outside the Havenite command chain. By amateurs, to boot.”

Lady Catherine frowned. “How can you be so certain of that? The demands they are making upon you, in exchange for keeping your daughter unharmed—”

Anton flicked the fingers of his hands, without removing the hands themselves from his knees. In its own way, the gesture was also explosive.

“Doesn’t make sense. For at least three reasons. First of all, the demands were left in my apartment. Written, if you can believe it, on a sheet of paper.”

Seeing the frown on the Countess’ face, Anton realized that he had to elaborate.

“Ma’am, no field agent in his right mind would leave that kind of physical evidence on the scene of a crime. They would have communicated with me electronically, in some form or other. Leaving aside the fact that a physical note is legal evidence, it’s almost impossible to keep some traces of yourself off of it. Modern forensic equipment—and the stuff the Solarians have is every bit as good as what the Manticoran police use—is damned near magical, the way it can squeeze information out of any kind of physical object a person has been in touch with.”

He reached into a pocket and pulled out a small, flat package. “As it happens, although the Chicago police are not officially involved, I do have some personal contacts. One of them saw to it that the ransom note was given the full treatment. As well as the evidence which I, ah, uncovered elsewhere. The results are on this disk.”

He tapped the package against his knee. “But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, let me finish my train of thought.”

With his left hand, he held up a finger. “So that’s point number one. The people who abducted my daughter were not professional Havenite agents, nor were they following orders from one. Or, if he was one, he was a desk pilot rather than a field man.”

He flicked up his middle finger to join the first. “Point two. The action itself— kidnapping, for God’s sake—is completely out of whack with the supposed result. I’m an officer in naval intelligence, true, but my specialty is technical evaluation. My background’s in naval construction. I was a yard dog before my wife was killed. After that—”

He paused for a moment, forcing his emotions under. “After that, I transferred into the Office of Naval Intelligence.” Another pause. “I guess I wanted to do something that would strike the Peeps directly. Unlike Helen, however, I was never good enough at naval tactics to have much hope of climbing to a command position in the fleet. So intelligence seemed like the best bet.”

Lady Catherine cocked her head. There was something faintly inquisitive about the gesture. Anton thought he understood it, and, if so, was a bit astonished at her perspicacity.

He smiled ruefully, running his fingers through his coarse mat of hair. “Yeah, I know. ‘And how many barrels of oil will thy vengeance fetch thee in Nantucket market, Captain Ahab?’ ”

She returned the smile with a great, gleaming one of her own. Her eyes crinkled with pleasure. “Good for you!” she exclaimed. “A rock-hard Gryphon highlander who can quote the ancient classics. I’ll bet you learned to do it just so you could show up the Manticore nobility.”

For all the gravity of his purpose, and his own tightly controlled terror for his daughter, Anton found it impossible not to laugh. Chuckle, at least. “Only at first, Lady Catherine! After a while, I started enjoying them in their own right.”

But the humor faded. Here, too, there was old heartbreak. It had been his wife Helen—a Manticoran herself, and from “good stock” if not the nobility—who had first introduced Anton to Moby Dick. Not, in truth, because Helen had been a devotee of classic literature, but simply because she had shared the passion for any kind of naval fiction which was common to many officers in the Manticoran navy. Among whose ranks was firmly held the opinion that Joseph Conrad was the greatest author of all time, except for a vocal minority which held forth for Patrick O’Brian.

He brought his focus back to the moment. “The point, Lady Catherine, is that I simply don’t know enough of any real value to the Peeps to make it worth their while to commit such a crime.”

“They are brutal bastards,” stated the countess. “Especially those sadists in State Security. I wouldn’t put anything past thosethugs.”

Again, Anton was surprised by the countess. Most Liberals and Progressives he’d met, especially aristocrats, were prone to downplay or even semi-excuse the viciousness of the Havenite regime with a lot of left- wing jargon. As if tyranny stopped being tyranny when you added more syllables to the term.

He shook his head. “That’s irrelevant. They might well be brutal enough—SS is certainly brutal enough—but—”

He couldn’t resist another chuckle. Talk about role reversals! “Lady Catherine, I am hardly an apologist for the Peeps but I’m also not a cretin. However foul that regime may be, they’re not storybook ogres out of a child’s fairy tale. There’s simply no purpose to this. Not enough, anyway.” He leaned forward, elaborating. “I was sent here to keep track of technology transfers from the Solarian League to the People’s Republic of Haven. Because of my technical background, I can make sense out of information that most intelligence specialists—” He hesitated. “Oh, hell, let’s call ourselves ‘spies,’ why don’t we?”

The countess smiled; Anton continued: “Which most spies can’t. But it’s in the nature of my work that I am trying to ferret out the enemy’s secrets, rather than keeping our own. So why would the Peeps go to the extreme of kidnapping my daughter in order to force information out of me that they already have? It’s not as if they need me to tell them what technology they’re getting from the League.”

“What about—”

“That idiot theory of the admiral’s? That the Peeps are playing a long-term game, figuring they can use me to pass along disinformation?”

The countess nodded. Anton turned his head and stared at the giant windows along the wall. Even sitting where he was, a good twenty feet away, the view was breathtaking. But he was completely oblivious to it.

“That brings me to the third reason this doesn’t make sense. It just isn’t done, Lady Catherine.” He sighed heavily. “I don’t know if I’ll have any more success trying to convince you of that than I did with the ambassador and the admiral.”

Anton hesitated, gauging the personality of the woman sitting across from him. The noble-woman. Then, moved by a sudden feeling that he understood her nature—some of it, at least—decided for straightforwardness.

“Lady Catherine, I will say this bluntly. Almost every aristocrat I know—sure as hell Ambassador Hendricks and Admiral Young—screws up when they try to understand the Peeps. They always look on them from the top down, instead of the bottom up. If they’re right-wing, with a sneer; if left-wing, with condescension. Either way, the view is skewed. The Havenites are people, not categories. I’m telling you, this kind of personal attack on a man’s family is so utterly beyond the pale that I can’t imagine any professional Peep intelligence officer authorizing it. Not a field man, at least. It just—” He paused, setting his jaws stubbornly. “It just isn’t done, that’s all. Not by us, not by them.”

Lady Catherine cocked her head again. “Are you trying to tell me that spies follow a ‘code of ethics’? Including Haven’s State Security?”