Changer of Worlds

historically speaking, lunatics had an unfortunate track record of success. Or of at least taking out the odd bodyguard in the attempt. All of which tended to keep one on one’s toes.

It also helped Tsakakis to take his boss’s unpredictable and inconvenient work schedule with a certain philosophical acceptance. Yes, it made his life difficult. But it also made it even more difficult for a potential assassin to predict the citizen secretary’s movements with any degree of confidence. And if his principal’s habit of disordering all of the citizen lieutenant’s carefully worked out schedules without warning kept his entire team off balance, it also prevented them from settling into a comfortable, overconfident rut.

Tsakakis reminded himself firmly that staying out of a rut was a good thing, but it was unusually difficult at the moment. He had no idea what could have inspired the citizen secretary to get up four hours early, but it would have been helpful if he’d mentioned the possibility that he might do so before he turned in for the night. If he had, Tsakakis and the normal daytime security commander could have coordinated their schedules properly. As it was, the citizen lieutenant had been forced to screen Citizen Captain Russell—again—to alert her to the fact that Citizen Secretary Saint-Just would not, in fact, be at home where she expected to find him when she and her people reported for duty. The citizen captain was as accustomed as Tsakakis himself to such sudden and unpredictable alterations, but that didn’t make her any happier about being awakened at two in the morning so that she could start waking up all of the rest of her people, as well. It hadn’t made her any less grumpy, either, and even though she’d known it wasn’t Tsakakis’ fault, she’d torn a strip off his hide just to relieve her own irritability.

Tsakakis grinned at the memory of Russell’s inspired vituperation and pithy comments on his probable ancestry. The citizen captain had been a Marine sergeant before the overthrow of the Harris Government, and her tongue’s roughness was renowned throughout State Security. Tsakakis had enjoyed more opportunities to observe her style and vocabulary than most, and some of those opportunities had been less than pleasant, but he’d always recognized that he was in the presence of an artist, and he wished that he’d had his com unit on record to capture this morning’s effort for posterity. He wasn’t certain, but he didn’t believe that she’d repeated herself even once.

They reached the citizen secretary’s private office, and Tsakakis wiped the grin off of his face and assumed his on-duty expression as Saint-Just disappeared into his inner sanctum. The citizen lieutenant took a few seconds to inspect the positioning of the rest of his seven-man detail in the public corridor and the outer office assigned to Saint-Just’s personal secretary, then opened a discreetly ordinary door and stepped through it. He crossed the floor of the cramped room beyond, seated himself before the surveillance panel, and brought the system online.

As public figures went, Oscar Saint-Just was more willing than most to accommodate the desires of his bodyguards. A lifetime as a security professional in his own right had a tendency to help a man appreciate the difficulties of his security staff’s duties. And the fact that no more than a few trillion people would have liked to kill him gave a certain added point to his responsiveness. But there were one or two places where he drew the line, and one of those was his steadfast refusal to permit an armed bodyguard actually in his office. Tsakakis would have been happier if he’d been allowed to stand his post where he could keep the citizen secretary directly under his own eye, but he knew how fortunate he was not to have to put up with the sort of eccentric whims and all too frequent temper tantrums that came out of someone like Citizen Secretary Farley. And at least Saint-Just didn’t raise any fuss over electronic surveillance.

Tsakakis unsealed his uniform tunic and hung it over the back of another chair, drew a cup of coffee from the urn in the corner, and settled himself comfortably for another thankfully dull, boring watch.

* * *

Major Alina Gricou swore with silent venom. Damn the man! They’d known he had a penchant for unpredictable movements, but why in hell had he had to pick this night, of all nights, to suffer from workaholic insomnia?

She forced her temper back under control, but it was hard. Her strike team packed the cargo compartment of the unmarked civilian air van claustrophobically, and she found herself longing for a proper assault shuttle’s com systems with an almost physically painful intensity. She could feel her people’s tension like an extension of her own. Every one of them knew the official plan as well as she did, which meant that all of them also knew that the operation’s carefully choreographed timing had gone straight down the crapper.

Gricou didn’t know why the execution code had been sent now, with so little warning—there hadn’t been time for neat, orderly briefings—but she suspected that she wouldn’t have liked the reasons if she had known what they were. All of the ones which occurred to her had to do with things like security breaches, and the thought that their targets’ SS security teams might be waiting for them had not been a palatable one.

And now this.

She closed her eyes and forced herself to think things through. If she absolutely had to, she could use her battle armor’s internal com to contact General Conflans, but that had to be a last-ditch option. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the security of the encrypted transmissions, but StateSec maintained a round-the-clock listening watch, and any military-band transmissions from unmarked civilian vans hovering just outside the residential tower which the commander of State Security called home were likely to arouse all sorts of suspicions.

All right. If he wasn’t here, there was only one other place he could be. And maybe that was actually a good thing. Gricou had never truly been happy about going after Saint-Just at home. Killing civilians in job lots was what StateSec did, not what she did, but she’d known going in that collateral civilian casualties would be unavoidable if she and her strike team met any organized resistance in a residential tower. But if he’d gone into the office early, there wouldn’t be any civilians around. Or not any innocent ones, at any rate. Of course, the downside was that StateSec HQ was scarcely what someone might call a soft target. But at three in the morning, the on-site security people’s guard was bound to be down at least a little, and she had what was supposed to be the complete, current blueprint of the tower in her armor’s computers. Best of all, no one would expect for a moment that anyone could be insane enough to go after the ogre in his own lair.

Getting in shouldn’t be a problem, she concluded. Getting out again might be another matter, but if they succeeded in taking Saint-Just alive, they’d have an extremely persuasive spokesman to get them past the defenses. And if they didn’t succeed in taking him alive—or at least in killing him—then they and all the members of their families were extremely unlikely to survive the scorched earth purges which were certain to follow. Nausea churned at the thought, but she didn’t have time for that. The operation had been planned to send her team in after Saint-Just and Captain Wicklow’s in after Rob Pierre, simultaneously and before anyone else moved, in order to get them in before any general alarm could be raised, and Wicklow had no way to know that Saint-Just had picked this morning to be elsewhere. Which meant she had to make her decision quickly.

She turned to the pilot.

“Turn us around, Pete. It looks like we’re going calling on the Citizen Secretary at his office, after all.” She bared her teeth in a predatory grin. “I hope he won’t be too upset that we didn’t call ahead for an appointment.”

Mikis Tsakakis yawned and stretched, then grimaced and reached for his coffee cup once more. Few things were more boring than watching someone else sit at a desk and do paperwork. But boring was good. Any bodyguard would unhesitatingly agree with that sentiment, he reflected, then snorted in mild amusement at his own thoughts and took a sip of coffee.

He glanced at a side display that monitored traffic around the tower. What happened outside was neither his concern nor his responsibility, but at this motherless hour any distraction was welcome.

Not that there was very much to see. StateSec’s critical departments worked around the clock, of course, but the population of the tower was less than half as large for the night shift, and the air car parking garages were correspondingly sparsely occupied. He skimmed idly through the various levels, and grimaced again. There was no real difference in the light levels within the vast internal caverns, yet somehow they seemed dimmer and more deserted at such an early hour.

He watched a civilian air van ease in through one of the automated security portals and quirked an eyebrow. The van was unmarked, but then, a lot of SS vehicles were unmarked, and he wondered what covert operation this one was assigned to.

Alina Gricou very carefully did not sigh in relief as the security systems accepted the admittance code. General Conflans had assured her that they’d managed to get their hands on valid perimeter security codes, and she