At All Costs

"My God," Grantville said, almost prayerfully.

"Wait, it gets better," Langtry said grimly. "The driver wasn't a Havenite national. He was a Solly, provided by the limo service with the transportation contract for the Peeps New Chicago embassy."

"A Solly," Grantville repeated carefully.

"A Solly," Langtry confirmed, "who's received the equivalent of just over seventy-five thousand Manticoran dollars in unrecorded, unreported credit transfers from a Havenite diplomatic account."

Grantville stared at him, far beyond consternation and into the realm of pure shock.

"What could they have been thinking?" He shook his head. "Surely they didn't think they could get away with this?"

"I've asked myself both those questions. But, to be frank, there's another one that's far more pressing at the moment."

Grantville looked at the Foreign Secretary, who shrugged.

"Why?" he asked simply. "Why should they do this?"

"God damn them!" Elizabeth Winton snarled as she stormed back and forth like a caged tigress, pacing the carpet behind the chair in which she should have been sitting.

Her fury was a living, breathing thing in the conference room, and Ariel crouched on the back of her chair, ears glued flat to his skull, scimitar claws shredding its upholstery like kneading scalpels. Samantha was in little better condition, her eyes half-closed as she crouched on the back of Hamish Alexander-Harrington's chair and fought to resist the other 'cat's blazing rage.

"Don't these fuckers ever learn a goddamned thing?" Elizabeth hissed. "What the hell did they-"

"Just a minute, Elizabeth."

The Queen whirled back towards the table, her face still suffused with rage, as White Haven spoke.

"What?" she snapped.

"Just... calm down for a second," he said, his own expression that of a man who'd taken a physical wound. "Think. Jim Webster was my friend for over seventy T-years. You can't possibly be more furious about his murder than I am. But you just asked a very important question."

"What question?" she demanded.

"Don't they ever learn," he said. She glared at him, and he looked back steadily. "Don't misunderstand me. And don't think for an instant, if it turns out the Peeps did this, that I won't want them just as dead as you do. For God's sake, Elizabeth-they already tried to kill my wife!"

"And your point is?" she asked in a slightly more moderate tone.

"And my point is that this whole thing is stupid. Assume the Peeps have access to whatever they used to make Timothy Mears try to kill Honor. In that case, why in hell would they choose their own ambassador's driver as their assassin? They could have picked someone with absolutely no co

"I-" Elizabeth began. Then she paused, obviously begi

"All right," she said, after a moment. "I'll grant that that's a legitimate question. But what about the credit transfers the Solly police turned up?"

"Ah, yes," White Haven said. "The credit transfers. Transfers made directly out of Havenite diplomatic funds, and made so clumsily the police turned them up within less than seven hours of begi

"Maybe it's a double-blind," Colonel Ellen Shemais suggested.

The head of Elizabeth's personal security detachment's job was at least half that of a spook. As a consequence, Elizabeth had made the colonel her liaison to the Special Intelligence Service, as well as her chief bodyguard.

"What do you mean, Ellen?" the Queen asked now.

"I mean Earl White Haven's objections are extremely well taken, Your Majesty," Shemais said. "It's got to be the stupidest way to arrange an ostensibly deniable assassination I've ever heard of, and the Queen's Own is something of an authority on the history of assassination. They might as well have had their ambassador pull the trigger himself. So, either they didn't do it, and someone's gone to enormous lengths to convince us they did, or else they deliberately set it up this way so they could scream they were being framed."

"Why would they do that, Colonel?" Baron Grantville asked.

"I don't know. The problem is, they could have a reason we simply don't know anything about that makes it seem perfectly logical to them. I can't personally conceive of what it might be, but it's the only explanation I can come up with for them to have set this up."

"What about the time element?" Langtry asked. "What if this was something they'd decided simply had to be done quickly, and they didn't have time to set it up better?"

"Won't wash, Mr. Secretary," Shemais said, shaking her head. "The earliest of those credit transfers was over three months old. So either they had a limousine driver-someone who was driving their own limousines, not someone else's-on their payroll for three months and then tapped him for this suicide mission, as the Earl described it, or else we were supposed to find the transfers. And if they recruited him specifically to kill Admiral Webster, then apparently they did it three months ago. Which was plenty of time for them to have set up another assassin, one with absolutely no co

"But who else could have wanted Jim dead?" Grantville asked.

"I can't answer that one, either, Prime Minister," Shemais admitted candidly. "But while you're asking it, you might also want to ask who else could have wanted him dead, and had the resources and technical capability to put this together, if it wasn't the Peeps? If it wasn't them, someone went to an awful lot of trouble to convince us it was."

"I don't think it was anyone else," Elizabeth growled. She was marginally less furious, and Ariel allowed her to lift him from the sadly shredded topof her chair as she seated herself at last. She settled the 'cat in her lap, and frowned harshly.

"I'm willing to admit at least the theoretical possibility that it wasn't the Peeps," she said, "but I don't believe it was someone else. I think it was them. I think they did it for some reason we can't know, possibly something Webster had found out on Old Earth that they didn't want us to learn about. Maybe even something he hadn't realized yet that he knew. Like you say, Ellen, we can't know what might have seemed like a logical reason to them. And as for the credit transfers, they could have had him doing something else before they picked him for this one."

"But-" Hamish began, only to have her cut him off with a quick, sharp shake of her head.

"No," she said. "I'm not going to play the think and double-think game. For now-for the moment-I'll operate on the assumption that it may not have been the Peeps. You've got that much. We'll go ahead with the summit, and we'll see what they have to say. I'd be lying if I said what's happened wasn't likely to make me a lot less willing to believe anything they say on Torch, but I'll go. But I'm getting incredibly tired of having these bastards murder people I care about, members of my government, and my ambassadors. This is it, as far as I'm willing to go."

Anthony Langtry looked as if he wanted to argue, but instead, he only closed his mouth and nodded, willing to settle for what he could get.

Elizabeth glared around the conference room one more time, then climbed back out of her damaged chair, nodded to her three cabinet secretaries, and left, accompanied by Colonel Shemais.