At All Costs

"I can do that," Nesbitt said thoughtfully. "It'll take some time, though. Especially to establish that all of this happened months ago."

"I assumed it would." Giancola nodded. "That's why I'm so pleased by the realization that Yves isn't going to be in any hurry to start blowing whistles. We've got some time to work with. But just to be on the safe side, we should probably deal with his insurance file first."

"Yes, tell me what you've got in mind for that, if you don't want me to simply make it go away."

"Two things," Giancola said. "First, we need a substitute letter of instruction to his attorney. One which has nothing at all to do with the contents of that particular file. Can you do that?"

"No problem," Nesbitt said, after a few seconds' thought. "He used a standard self-generated legal e-form for it. Probably didn't trust attorney-client privilege to hold if his lawyer knew what he had in mind ahead of time. Since no flesh-and-blood knows what should be in it, no one's going to ask any questions if I alter its content."

"Good. Go ahead and get that done immediately. And once we've defused that particular landmine, we need you to go into his existing file and make some judicious alterations. I don't want you to get rid of it entirely. I don't even want you to make it incriminate someone else. Instead, I want you to turn it into a forgery."

"Forgery?"

"Yes. It's going to have to be carefully done, but I want that file to prove Yves pla

"You're figuring that if the fellow who really did it all also manufactured evidence that you were responsible for it, it will demonstrate that, in fact, you didn't have a thing to do with it," Nesbitt said slowly, gray eyes begi

"Exactly. The only way to 'prove' I didn't do it is to provide someone else who obviously did. And if the someone else who did it also manufactured evidence to implicate me in order to divert suspicion from himself, he obviously wouldn't have tried to divert it to someone who was really his accomplice and might have evidence of his own to prove his guilt as part of a deal with prosecutors."

"Neat," Nesbitt said after several moments of consideration. "Complicated. And I can see a half-dozen places right off the top of my head where the entire thing could go off the rails. But it's doable. It really is. And it's so damned Byzantine and filled with double-think and possible failure points that it would never have occurred to a professional like Usher-or me, for that matter. I think I can pull it all together for you, but putting all the pieces in place is going to take even longer than I'd thought. I don't like having that long for something to go wrong in."

"Not a problem," Giancola disagreed, waving one hand in a dismissive gesture. "As soon as you've dealt with the lawyer's instructions, Yves can go ahead and suffer that accident. It will have to be a very accidental accident, you understand?"

"That I can handle," Nesbitt said confidently.

"Then as soon as that's out of the way, you can move on to putting all of the other bits and pieces together. Once everything's been neatly tied to Yves, we can 'discover' the evidence anytime we want to. For that matter, we might even decide the thing to do is to steer Usher and his FIA to the evidence. Let Kevin turn it up. In fact, if I weren't afraid we'd be getting too fancy, I'd almost prefer for him to find Yves' evidence falsely implicating me and accept it initially, until State's own security types detected the fact that it was a forgery. Having him suspect me, or even formally accuse me, when I turn out to be totally i

He gazed thoughtfully at the ceiling for several heartbeats, then shook his head regretfully.

"No. We've got enough balls in the air without adding that one to it."

"You have no idea how glad I, as the wizard charged with conjuring all these minor miracles for you, am to hear you say that," Nesbitt said dryly.

"I'm always pleased when I'm able to make my associates happy," Giancola assured him. Then the Secretary of State's eyes narrowed once more. "But now that you're a happy wizard, do you really believe you can pull all of this off?"

"Yes. I'm not absolutely positive of it-not with it all coming at me cold, this way. But as I said, I think it's doable. I'm going to have to sit down and look at it very carefully, probably for several days, at least, before I can tell you more than that. At an absolute minimum, though, I'm certain I can disappear Grosclaude's evidence if it turns out we have to do that, instead. And I feel reasonably confident I can arrange the database hack you want and make it crystal-clear he was behind it. As for the rest, I'm going to have to see how it all comes together before I can tell you positively one way or the other."

"Take your time-within reason, of course." Giancola grimaced. "One thing I think we can count on is that this war isn't going to end tomorrow, or even next week. We've got time to do it right... and we'd damned well better not do it wrong."

Chapter Six

"That was delicious, Jackson," Honor sighed appreciatively as Jackson McGwire, White Haven's butler, oversaw the removal of the dessert dishes. Or, more precisely, of the dessert dish, singular, since the only one on the table was the one in front of Honor. "Please tell Tabitha that she outdid herself on the chocolate mousse."

"I'll be happy to, Your Grace," McGwire said, with a small half-bow and a twinkle. Honor's genetically modified metabolism's need for calories was phenomenal, and Tabitha Dupuy, White Haven's cook, and her staff had taken it as a personal challenge. So far, they had yet to repeat themselves with a single dessert offering, despite the recent frequency of her visits to the Alexander family's seat, and Honor and her hosts had a small betting pool going on how long they could keep it up.

Honor started to say something else, then paused as Nimitz sat up straighter in his treecat-sized highchair. He and Samantha, his mate, sat between their adopted humans, and now the male 'cat raised both true-hands to the top of his head, palms turned inward, raised first and second fingers on both hands signing the letter "U" and wiggling backward. From there, the right true-hand slid down, the palm facing his body, fingers extended and facing left, and moved from left to right. Then his true-hands crooked in the sign for the letter "C", with the tip of its thumb resting on the upturned first finger of his other true-hand before both true-hands came together in front of him, index fingers extended and held together, and moved across his body, fingers separating and coming back together again as they traveled. And, finally, the second finger of his right true-hand touched his lips before the hand moved down and out a bit, while his thumb rubbed over the same finger.

"Of course, Nimitz," McGwire said with a smile. "I'll inform Ms. Dupuy personally."

"Please do," Honor reinforced, reaching out to rub the treecat's ears affectionately. "While I'm not a co

"I'll certainly tell her that, too, Your Grace," McGwire assured her.

"I think that's probably all we'll need, Jackson," Hamish Alexander, Thirteenth Earl of White Haven, said from his place at the head of the table. "If we do discover we need anything-or if Her Grace should discover she has a hollow ankle somewhere that still needs filling-we'll buzz."