chase.
The boys weren't moving too quickly either. By the time a cavalry contingent met them, drawn by the locomotive explosion, both P. J. and Sergei looked pretty footsore.
The lieutenant in charge of the search party immediately dispatched a messenger back to the Graf von Esbach. The prime minister arrived with a carriage almost as soon as they reached level ground again. Megan piled pillows around herself and leaned back, closing her eyes. She could smell smoke coming off her clothes, and was sure that she looked a sight.
A very long, very hot bath, she promised herself.
Then she remembered this was veeyar. All she really had to do was cut her connection.
Von Esbach's quiet voice cut into her thoughts. 'Did Your Majesty recognize any of the men who abducted you?'
Megan opened her eyes. 'No, but I could describe them.'
As she ran through detailed descriptions of the quartet of kidnappers, the prime minister shook his head. 'None of them sound like members of Gray Piotr's inner circle. Of course, he could have hired some desperate men to do the job-'
'They were dressed like gentlemen,' Megan said, 'even if they acted like villains from an old melodrama. At least two of them knew how to handle a sword.'
'The redheaded one-he sounds like the person who approached me in the other plot I mentioned,' Sergei said.
The jealous AHSO members, Megan remembered. Just wonderful. I've got at least two sets of enemies, and half the people I can trust have pulled out on me.
The adrenalin high that had pushed through this whole little adventure was finally wearing off. Megan hid a sudden yawn. She also tried to stretch, groaning at the response from her stiffening muscles.
This princess business isn't all it's cracked up to be, she thought.
All of a sudden she was looking forward to reality and tomorrow's simple, prosaic fencing lesson.
In his family's Washington apartment, Leif Anderson sat on the living room couch, frowning at the images on the holographic display. With his computer's help, he'd edited the multimedia presentation on fencing, culling all the references to the various masters he now recognized into one file. It was pretty amazing.
At a sudden thought he checked the copyright date on the presentation. The thing had just come out. There was no way Alan Slaney could have cribbed his inner circle from this presentation. That meant he must have been mining fencing history, assembling the necessary research to create those fencing masters as characters, for-how long?
Leif went back over his confrontation with Louis Rondelle. The short, tough Frenchman had seemed like a real person, not a nonrole-playing character responding to a program. If Rondelle was a typical creation, Latvinia began to look less like a labor of love and more like the product of obsession.
Well, well, well, Leif thought. Mr. Alan 'Aw, Shucks' Slaney has some hidden depths.
Leif headed into the kitchen. One good thing about this particular distraction. His stomach had quieted down, and he was ready to eat something. He constructed a sandwich and stood at the kitchen counter, frowning as he chewed.
When you come down to it, he suddenly thought, what do we really know about Alan Slaney?
Everybody (including Leif) had simply hung a 'nice guy' label on Slaney and left it at that.
From what I've heard about Slaney, he comes off as trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, /cmd, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, c/eart, am/ reverent- a// f/ie oW /toy Scowf virtues. Well maybe that's not surprising. They came into being in the early 1900s, after the Boer War.
In fact, Alan embodied many of the qualities of the heroes from the novels Latvinia was set up to emulate. He was honorable, pleasant, hardworking, good at sport-and fencing, a gentleman's sport, at that.
On the other hand, no gentleman of Ruritanian romance would dream of making a living as a glorified janitor, Leif thought. I guess you could add 'modest' to the developing character profile.
Add it all up, and a cynical voice at the back of Leif's head whispered, 'Too good to be true.'
Leif finished his sandwich, cleaned the dishes, and headed down the hallway to his room. What he intended to do now might require tools that he wasn't about to leave traces of on the family's home system.
He checked over the computer-link couch, sat back, closed his eyes, and linked in. This time he went to his virtual workspace, the Icelandic stave house of his dreams. Leif opened his eyes sitting on the living room couch and immediately headed for the floor-to-ceiling shelves set against one wall. Literally thousands of tiny 3-D icons, each representing a different program, stood ranked in front of him.
Pursing his lips, Leif began choosing his weapons: a glowing question mark; an icon like a fiery red shovel; and finally a bone-white skeleton holding a stylized key. Something told him that if he wanted the true story on Alan Slaney, he'd need something more than the usual search engines.
Holding up each icon separately in the palm of his hand, he imparted specific instructions. As he did, each of the little doodads flashed and disappeared.
Okay, they're off and searching the Net at the speed of light, Leif thought. But that doesn't mean they'll be back with anything very fast. What do I do in the meantime?
Of course, there were still all those virtmail folders to go through.
Leif did not do a great job of sorting, half-distracted as he was. Several items he'd probably end up wanting were instead carelessly trashed. But it helped pass the time while his specialized Net agents did a quick onceover of Alan Slaney's past and present life.
The question-mark program was the most general- purpose of the three, making all the usual general inquiries-date of birth, upbringing, schooling, etc. Its most off-beat quality was that it was more persistent and less selective than most search engines, harvesting a wide field of data.
The red shovel was more specialized; in fact, it was very selective. It looked specifically for dirt on a given subject-brushes with the law, arrests, police records, criminal and civil court cases, stuff like that. Unless a judicial seal had been placed on the records, that program could usually worm information out of any public databases.
The skeleton key program went even farther, checking for dirt in private files that normally weren't available to the general public-or most entry-grade hackers.
When he got the signal that the low-order profile had been compiled, Leif cheerfully stopped messing around with his folders and began reading.
Nothing really seemed to leap out at Leif. Alan Slaney was indeed as old as he said he was. He grew up in New York City, the only son of a nice middle-class family. His grades weren't just good, they were spectacular. Young Alan was quite the whiz kid. His parents began moving around the country, finding schools that would promote their son to classes matching his ability. Alan finally wound up graduating from college at a time most kids were trying to decide which high school they would attend.
But college represented the first big check for young Alan-he tried out for the fencing team there, but was repeatedly beaten by larger, older, and more experienced opponents. Could that be why he turned to the more scholarly approach of historical fencing? Leif wondered.
Not satisfied with a bachelor's degree in political science, Alan went on to win a doctorate in record time.
Then… a blank. No jobs, no schooling-
Leif blinked. Wait a minute. That wasn't exactly a surprise. Alan would have been only about seventeen. He wouldn't be going to school anymore, and what sort of job would a seventeen-year-old expect to win? Most kids would be slinging hamburgers or ice cream at that age.
The next hit came from legal records-a will from Alan's parents being probated. Leif dug back. That looked okay-a car accident. Alan wound up with a house and a little money. A couple of years later there he was selling the house, moving to Washington, and setting himself up.
Not exactly a surprise for a job-seeking poli sci wonk to come to the nation's capital. If you want to play politics, this was the biggest arena available.
But it didn't explain how an apparent genius with a background in political science wound up as little more than a maintenance man.
Alan hadn't killed anybody, at least according to police records. In fact, he hadn't even been caught spitting
