At All Costs

Chapter Five

"Mr. Secretary, Colonel Nesbitt is here for his three o'clock."

"Hm?" Secretary of State Arnold Giancola looked up from the correspondence on his display with a bemused expression. He gazed at his administrative assistant for a second or two, then blinked. "I'm sorry, Alicia. What did you say?"

Alicia Hampton suppressed a temptation to shake her head in fond exasperation. Arnold Giancola was by far the most satisfactory boss she'd ever had. He had a reputation for ambition, and she could believe it, but he was unfailingly courteous to his staffers, charismatic, and generally thoughtful. And he'd also become increasingly absent-minded as the interstellar diplomatic situation darkened. He was working far too hard these days, and he'd taken to leaving the security systems in his office up all the time so he could be certain no one would interrupt him while he did it. Which only helped him forget things even more thoroughly.

"I said Colonel Nesbitt is here for his three o'clock, Sir," she repeated.

"Oh?" Giancola frowned, then, "Oh! Nesbitt. I'd forgotten all about him. Ask him to come in, please, Alicia!"

"Of course, Mr. Secretary." Alicia smiled at him and stepped back into the outer office.

"The Secretary will see you now, Colonel," she told the tallish, gray-eyed, broad shouldered man in civilian clothing.

"Thank you," Nesbitt said, pocketing the reader he'd been perusing while he waited for the appointed time.

"Oh, Colonel," she said quietly as he started to step past her, "please do remember that the Secretary's calendar is very tight. He has another appointment scheduled in twenty-five minutes." Nesbitt looked at her quizzically, and she smiled apologetically. "He's been a bit more absent-minded and forgetful the last couple of days. He's likely to forget, and I don't want to cut you off before you're done when I a

"Oh, I see!" Nesbitt's expression cleared, and he smiled back at her. "I'll try to keep him focused, Ms. Hampton. And he's lucky he's got someone like you looking after him."

"We all try, Colonel," Alicia said. "It would be a lot easier if he didn't drive himself as hard as he does."

Nesbitt smiled again, sympathetically, and walked past her into the i

"Mr. Secretary," he said, advancing across the deep carpet towards the half-hectare or so of desk behind which Giancola sat.

"Jean-Claude," Giancola said, in a brisk, no-nonsense tone which went very oddly with the preoccupied fa‡ade he was so careful to project for his staff... among other people. "Come in. Sit down. We haven't got much time."

"I know." Nesbitt seated himself in the indicated, comfortable chair, and crossed his legs. "Your charming assistant is rather concerned about you, you know, Mr. Secretary. She reminded me of the short window we have for this meeting because she was afraid you're getting absent-minded enough you wouldn't remember."

"Good." Giancola smiled.

"Really?" Nesbitt cocked his head. "Actually, I'm wondering if it's really good tradecraft, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I don't mind your saying it, although that doesn't necessarily mean I agree with you. Why do you think it might not be?"

"Kevin Usher's no fool, whatever public image he chooses to project," Nesbitt said. "I don't know whether there's any truth to the rumors about his wife and Cachat-I think a lot of people wonder exactly what's going on there-but I do know the rumors about his drunke

"And?" Giancola prompted just a bit impatiently. "It's not as if I hadn't figured that out for myself, Jean-Claude."

"And a man who's busy presenting that kind of false image to the rest of the universe is likely to wonder if someone else, especially someone who seems to have changed as much as you have, isn't doing the same thing. And if you are, he's going to wonder why."

"Oh." Giancola sat back, drumming lightly on his desktop with the fingers of one hand, then shrugged. "I see where you were going now. You may even have a point. On the other hand, it doesn't much matter what I do; Usher's going to think I'm up to something however I act. So I'm basically playing a shell game. I'm leaving my security systems up most of the time, no matter who I'm seeing, which means there's no way for him to tell whose conversations I really want to be certain he can't overhear. I'm sure he understands that; my little charade is to help explain to my staff and everyone else why I keep 'forgetting' to switch the jammers off. It isn't really directed at him at all, except, possibly, in a very secondary sort of way. I do like to spend the occasional minute thinking about how incredibly irritating he must find the entire thing, though."

"I see." Nesbitt regarded him narrowly, then shrugged. "If it amuses you, I don't imagine it's really going to do any harm. Personally, I'd find the entire thing much too exhausting to maintain, but that's up to you."

"If it starts getting tiring, I can always stop. Usher will probably find that even more irritating." Giancola smiled nastily. "But we're going to have to talk about that some other time. Right now, I need your report."

"Of course." Nesbitt folded his hands over his raised knee and tilted his head thoughtfully to one side. "I'm happy to say Grosclaude wasn't quite as clever as he thought," he said. "You're right-he did retain a complete file of the correspondence. Both sets of correspondence. Unfortunately for him, he knew he wouldn't be able to get the file off Manticore with him when he was expelled. They weren't going to be very concerned with observing all the niceties of diplomatic immunity after we'd just launched what amounted to a sneak attack against them, and Manty surveillance is too good for him to get anything by it if they pulled out all the stops. And even if they didn't find it, there was always the possibility the security types waiting for him at our end might. So he piggybacked the information through the diplomatic bag several days before the balloon went up and had it remailed to a private account in Nouveau Paris after the bag got here."

"And?" Giancola said when he paused.

"And, also unfortunately for him, it was an account I already knew about. Courtesy of a few backdoors the new management still hasn't found yet, I was able to track the file to his account and also when he pulled it back out after his own arrival from Manticore and lodged it in the secure database of his attorney's law firm. Along with a cover letter directing that the file in question be sent to Kevin Usher's personal attention should anything... unfortunate happen to him."

"Damn." Giancola's mouth tightened. "I was afraid he'd done something like that."

"Only sensible thing for him to do," Nesbitt agreed. "Although, if he really knew what he was doing, he never would've used this sort of approach. He'd have buried it on an old-fashioned record chip under a mattress somewhere and used someone he'd never had any traceable relationship with before as his bagman. This way, he might as well have left me an engraved invitation."

"What do you mean?" Giancola asked intently.

"I mean that the central net is still riddled with StateSec backdoors, Mr. Secretary. To really nail them all shut, they'd have to slag the old system down and start from scratch. Oh," Nesbitt shrugged, "they actually did a fairly good job when LePic and Usher set things up over at Justice. I'd guess they probably managed to find and close a good ninety percent of them. But there were so many in place that they never had a prayer of getting all of them. I'm sure they're still looking, and of course not knowing for sure whether or not they've found my little keyholes does tend to make life a bit more exciting. There's always the chance they have found them and they're just sitting there, monitoring, letting me tie the noose around my own neck before they pounce."