At All Costs

Well, she'd feel them this evening, she told herself. And, at least as importantly, she would feel Emily's support. Perhaps she'd been an adoptive Grayson too long, she thought, her lips twitching in a smile of mingled tenderness and amusement. She wondered how many other Manticorans would have found the thought of spending an intimate evening in the company of the wife of the father of her unborn child comforting, yet that was the only word she could think of to describe it.

And she didn't really care how bizarre it might once have seemed to her pre-Grayson self.

Chapter Fourteen

"Well, well, well... there you are," Jean-Claude Nesbittt murmured.

He studied the lines of alphanumeric text on his display for several seconds, then frowned thoughtfully and began very carefully copying the critical passages of the document for safekeeping. He made certain he had everything he needed, then closed the file and withdrew from the "secure" memory bank as tracelessly as he had entered it.

He punched up another file, ru

He reached the end of the list, grunted in satisfaction, and then closed that file, as well. It wasn't easy. In fact, it was extraordinarily tempting to move ahead quickly now that he'd completed the preparatory groundwork. But it was late, he was tired, and he'd seen entirely too many fatigue-induced errors in his time. Besides, Giancola's instructions to replace Grosclaude's letter of instruction to his attorneys had been carried out over two months ago. Even if something happened to Grosclaude before the colonel got around to completing the rest of project, he was covered. So best to take things slowly and cautiously.

He powered down his console, nodded to his own reflection in the blank display, and pushed back his chair. Time for bed, he thought, but first, a well-earned nightcap.

"Are you really serious about this, Boss?" Special Senior Inspector Abrioux asked quizzically.

"And just what about my clearly phrased directive makes you think I might not be?" Kevin Usher, Director of the Federal Investigative Agency of the Republic of Haven inquired.

Usher was a huge, powerfully built man. Danielle Abrioux, on the other hand, was delicately petite. Like Usher, she'd come up through the Resistance before joining the FIA, and if she looked like a slender, brown-haired child, appearances could be deceiving. She was a very dangerous "child"... as the shades of over a dozen assassinated InSec and StateSec officials-and far more currently carnate inmates of the Republic's penal systems-would have vehemently attested. At the moment, she was perched on the corner of Usher's desk, sipping coffee, and a matching coffee mug sat on his blotter, because Abrioux was one of his most trusted investigators. She knew all about his alleged drunke

"Boss," she said now, her tone just a bit plaintive, "you know you've got a screwy sense of humor. Just look at what you put Gi

"My sense of humor isn't the least bit screwy," he said with dignity. "Everyone else's sense of humor is. But in this particular instance, I'm serious as a heart attack, Da

"My God." Abrioux lowered her coffee cup, her smile fading. "You really are, aren't you?"

"I am, and I wish to hell I wasn't."

Abrioux felt her stomach congealing into a lump of frozen lead. She set her coffee cup down and pushed the saucer away from her.

"Let me get this straight, Kevin," she said very quietly. "You're telling me you think we may have gone back to war against the Manties not because they altered our diplomatic traffic, but because we did?"

"Yes." Usher's always deep voice sounded like a gravel crusher, and he inhaled deeply. "I'm not saying I'm convinced that's what happened, but I'm afraid it may be, Da

"Why?" she demanded.

"Partly because of Wilhelm's reports." Usher tipped back in his float chair. "We lost a lot of our best conduits when we took down Saint-Just's organization, but he's still got a few sources in place inside the Manty Foreign Office. Not as highly placed as they were, but high enough to have access to the sorts of insider shop talk permanent assistant undersecretaries get to hear. And according to them, everyone-everyone, from the top down-is convinced we did it."

"That may not indicate anything," Abrioux countered. "Putting something like this together successfully would have required very tight security. Not only that, but it would have been put together by the High Ridge Government, not the current one. So anyone who'd been in on it would probably be out of office by now, anyway."

"Agreed. But the people who are so thoroughly convinced we're the heavies of this particular piece are the people who replaced High Ridge's cronies. Every other bit of gossip Wilhelm's sources have given us only confirms the utter contempt they have for their immediate predecessors. If there were even the tiniest sniff of a possibility that anyone in the High Ridge crowd had been responsible for this, someone would have picked up on it by now. You know as well as I do there are always conspiracy theorists hiding in the woodwork, Da

"Hmmm...." Abrioux plucked at her lower lip, then shrugged. "Maybe. But I've gotta tell you, Boss, it sounds mighty flimsy."

"I said that was part of the reason," Usher reminded her. "There are other factors-straws in the wind, you might say. One is how well I know the players on our side."

"Boss, I hate Giancola's guts myself. And I wouldn't be too surprised at anything he did. But much as I might like him as the baddie for this one, I think you're reaching. First of all, he's smart. He has to know that sooner or later whoever wins this war's going to get her hands on the other side's diplomatic archives. Second, however much I may despise and distrust him, I don't see even him as deliberately starting a war just to serve his own personal political ambitions. Especially not when there's no way to be sure we're going to win the damned thing. And, third, how the hell could he have pulled it off without someone else at State realizing he'd altered the original notes?"

"I never said he was stupid," Usher said mildly. "And taking your first and second points together, I also never said he deliberately set out to start a war. If my more paranoid suspicions are on track, what he wanted was to create a crisis he could then successfully 'resolve' as a demonstration of his own competence and tough-mindedness to strengthen his hand when he runs for the presidency a few years down the road. If he'd managed to pull off what I think he was after, there wouldn't have been a war, and neither side would have access to the other's archives. At the very least, it would probably have been decades before anyone had a chance to compare originals."