been nursing Planck, but the chancellor’s got a fractured lower left leg and a serious head wound. One or both are infected, because he’s running a couple degrees of fever.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How’d you get a bug on a chancellor?”
“Sources and methods, General.” Translation: no comment.
The Duck rolled his eyes. “He’s Triple-A cleared. You might as well tell him.”
Bill frowned. “I didn’t, General. You did. You and Vice Marshall Metzger.”
“What?”
“You remember after the Armistice, and before the embargo, you picked out a ’Puter at a jeweler’s in Georgetown? Antique Rolex mechanical watch case, with modern guts?”
I frowned. “As a gift for Aud. The Tressens can’t get used to telling time digitally. I sent it to Jude so he could hand deliver it. What does that matter?”
Bill shrugged. “Counterespionage monitors the spending patterns of everybody with Triple-A clearance or higher. When a guy who’s worn a plastic Timex all his life suddenly blows four months’ pay on an antique watch, they’re curious.”
The heat of adrenaline spiked through me. “They thought I was on the take?”
“They think everybody’s on the take. It’s their job. When they found out who you were having it engraved to, they passed the word to the Tressen desk.”
“When I picked up the watch, the clerk said there had been a break-in. But my order was okay.”
“Perfectly okay. Just midnight modified with a homer/monitor.”
“You bastards.” I rolled my eyes. “Did they repeal the Constitution while I was gone?”
Bill shook his head. “The Constitution’s fine. The Bill of Rights applies to American citizens, not aliens. Chancellor Planck’s as alien as they come.”
I thumbed my chest. “I’m an American citizen.”
Howard raised his palm. “Who was entrusted with information that could badly damage the national interest if sold.”
I pointed at Howard. “You keep out of this! R and D Spooks aren’t real Spooks. So stop defending them.” Then I paused and sighed. I said to Bill, “You could have asked me.”
Bill shook his head. “You would have told us to go to hell.”
Jude smiled. “He’s right. You would have. And we’d have no idea where Aud was right now.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. You know where Planck is. Do the Ferrents know?”
Bill shook his head again. “Must not. Or he’d be dead.”
I said, “I’ve got days to kill while the Duck presents my credentials. Aud Planck’s my friend. I want to see him.”
Bill shook his head. “You’d just lead the Ferrents to him. And they’re just old-school enough to shoot a roving diplomat first and ask questions later.”
I held out one hand, palm up. “Oh, come on! You said it yourself. Ferrent trade craft is straight out of the Cold War. You can’t shake a Ferrent tail?”
Bill the Spook shook his head at me. “I never said we couldn’t shake a Ferrent tail. But you can’t, General. Without help.”
FORTY-THREE
I SPENT THE EVENING IN A STUDIO in the consulate’s subbasement, along with Jude. The Spooks holo’d us reading, walking around, climbing stairs. Then we did it all again wearing different clothes. The next morning the Spooks snuck us out of the consulate using a Cold War shell game with hats, dark glasses, and similarly clothed doubles. The surveillance Ferrents, who, like other Tressens, were barely accustomed to tintype photographs, would see our holos through windows or in the courtyard and be fooled into thinking we were still in the consulate.
Disguised as a fishmonger, authentic down to the smell, I arrived at a tenement apartment in the old town before Jude. The apartment was furnished with one bentwood chair and an equally talkative, stubbled Iridian resistance bodyguard armed with a kitchen knife.
Ten minutes later, Jude, in coveralls over his civvies, carrying a merchant’s basket of bread, stepped through the apartment door. As the silent Iridian stepped around him to leave, Jude held out the basket. “For your family.”
The man stared at the basket, then at Jude. “If my family was alive, I wouldn’t risk this. You two stay put and shut up.”
Jude frowned as he watched the man go.
“Still think the RS is just restoring order?”
Jude double-locked the door, then stepped alongside me. After a minute, he wrinkled his nose. “You stink.”
After sunset, another resistance fighter, this one, young and holo-star handsome, gave us coats to wear, then drove us toward the coast in the backseat of a custom-bodied phaeton, top up against the cool night. Sometime in the next couple hours we would cross what had until the Armistice been the Tressen-Iridian border, and would thereafter roll through what had until recently been the Unified Duchies of Iridia. I nodded off, leaning against the phaeton’s padded-leather door frame.
Two hours later, brake squeal snapped me awake.
FORTY-FOUR
“YOU TWO SHUT UP!” Our driver slowed as his headlights lit a trench-coated Ferrent, who stood in the middle of the road ahead of us waving his arms. The flank of a sedan angled across the pavement behind him, and two helmeted infantry regulars, rifles unslung, leaned on the roadblock’s fender.
The Ferrent stepped alongside our car’s open driver’s-side window, propped one foot on the running board, and gazed up and down our phaeton’s flanks. Segmented chrome exhaust headers as thick as a woman’s thigh snaked out from beneath a hood as long as a wet-navy cruiser’s. “I know this car. From party rallies. It’s Commissioner Kost’s.”
“He’s my uncle.”
The Ferrent raised his eyebrows beneath his slouch hat’s brim. “Oh, really? Papers.” He extended a leather- gloved hand, palm up.
Our driver pulled three folded documents from inside his jacket, then handed them to the Ferrent.
The Ferrent jerked his thumb at the two infantry grunts behind him. “We’re after the bastards that ambushed the chancellors.”
In fact, the bastard they should have been after was Zeit, the remaining healthy chancellor. The saving grace of this mess was that my godson was seeing the reality of the Republican Socialist utopia that he and Planck thought they served. It was actually hell with better cars.
Our driver nodded. “Bastards. They should be shot.”
“Oh, they will be.”
Behind the Ferrent, one GI worked his rifle’s bolt. I swallowed.
The Ferrent didn’t unfold the papers, just poked his head through the window at us. “Who are you two?”
I fingered the white silk scarf drawn up around my throat, beneath a fur-collared coat that made me look like an organ grinder’s monkey. Bad enough to speak with an offworld accent. Worse, a translator disk’s rasp might not pass for natural speech.
Our driver tossed his head toward us. “Wounded veterans. Mute due to their wounds. We’re bound to my uncle’s place on the coast, for a holiday with him.”
The Ferrent raised his eyebrows. “So late?”
