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"There's still a problem. He won't believe a word of it. Giraud said it: that tape was an intervention. Your father saw it—" He reacted to that as if it had hit in the gut. "You haven't," she said, "have you? Ever. You don't know what Ari did. You should have asked to see it. You should have gone over that damned thing as often as it took. It fluxed me too, fluxed me so I wasn't thinking straight: it took Giraud to point out the obvious. If Icould see what Ari did, so could your father. Your father didn't see it as a seventeen-year-old kid, your father saw it as a psychsurgeon who had to wonder exactly how often and how deep Ari's interventions had been. He had to wonder how far they'd gone. You and Grant worry about each other when you've been separate three days. I know. You know they can't run an intervention on Jordan—but don't you think he has to wonder—after twenty years—just whose you are?"
Justin leaned forward and picked up his drink from the table, breathing harder: she marked the flare of his nostrils, the intakes and the quick outflow. And the little body moves that said he wanted out of that round. "Florian," he said, "would you mind terribly—I thank I'd like something stronger." She could read Florian too, instant suspicion: Florian distrusted such little distracting tactics, with thoughts engendered of lifelong training. He was not about to turn his back on an Enemy. "Florian," she said, "his usual."
Florian met her eyes, nodded deferentially then and got up, not even looking at Catlin, who sat beside her: there was no question that Catlin was on, and hair-triggered.
"You can talk to your father," she said to Justin, "but I doubt he's believed you entirely for years. Not—entirely. He knowsyou were psychprobed, over and over again; and he doesn't believe in Reseune's virtue. If you try to reason with him—I'm afraid what he's going to think, do you see? And I'm not just saying that to get at you, Justin, I'm afraidwhat he's going to think, and I don't think you can do anything to stop him, not with reason."
"You forget one thing," he said, leaning back against his seat.
"What's that?"
"The same thing that keeps Grant and me alive. That past a certain point you don't care. Past a certain point—" He shook his head, and looked up as Florian brought the drink back. "Thank you."
"No problem, ser." Florian sat down.
"If he gets into public," Ari took up the thread of thought, "he can do himself harm, he can do me harm, of course—which I don't want. It's possible that your father has been psychologically—very isolate, for a very long time: insular and insulated from all the problems going on in the world. If he was protecting you against the release of that tape—which may be a real motive for him lying until now—he evidently believes you're capable of handling it or he's been told something by someone that makes him desperate enough to risk you as well as himself—if that message actually came from him, which is a question . . . but it doesn't really matter. What he'll do—that matters. And we have an image problem in all this mess, you understand me?"
Justin wasunderstanding her, she thought so by the little motions of his eyes, the tensions in his face. "What is there to do?" he said. "You've left Grant back there; I don't know what they're doing to my father at Planys—"
"Nothing. They're not going to do anything to him."
"Can you guarantee that?"
She hesitated awhile over that answer. "That depends," she said. "That very much depends. That's why you're with me. Someonehas to do something. I'd wanted to be inconspicuous for a while more, but I'm the only face the media knows and I'm the only one who has enough credit with them to patch this mess up—but I need you, I need your help. Possibly you'll double on me. I don't know. But whether it's true or false what they're saying, it's going to be terribly hard for your father to handle this or to back away from the cameras if he gets the chance. You're my hope of stopping that."
Another small silence. Then: "How did you get Denys's permission for this move?"
"The same way I've gotten you into my residency. I told Denys you're mine, that I ran a major intervention, that Grant is far more of a hold on you than your father is; that you'd choose him over your father if it came to a choice, because your father can take care of himself; while Grant—" She shrugged. "That kind of thing. Denys believes it."
That got through to him, just about enough threat to make sure he understood. Justin sat there staring at her, mad, very mad. And very worried. "You're quite an operator, young sera."
The compliment made her smile, though sadly. "Giraud died too soon. The Paxers aren't going to sit still in all this commotion. The elections are going to be chaos, there may be more bombings, more people dead—the whole thing is going to blow wide if we don't head it off. You know all of that. Your work is exactly in my field. That's one thing at stake. So you can put your father in a position where he has to do something desperate and put himself out front of something he can't control and I don't think he has any idea exists; or you can help me defuse this, calm him down and let me run a little game with Denys—put your father wise to it if you can, I don't mind; encourage your father to wait until I dorun Reseune. We can double-team Denys, or you can blow everything to hell with the newsservices—by asking to get your father in front of the cameras; by doing things that make you look like you're under duress—"
"The truth, you mean."
"—or by doing things that give you a bad image. You can't look like a traitor to your own father. You're very good with bright people and design-systems; but you don't know where the traps are, you're not current with the outside world, you're not used to the press and you're not used to picking up on your own public image. For God's sake take advice and be careful. If you get stubborn about this you can lose every leverage you've got."
He stared at her a long time, and sipped his whiskey. "Tell me," he said finally, "exactly what sort of thing I should watch out for."
Grant watched, entranced by the precision, as the cards crackled into a precise shuffle in the girl's fingers. "That's amazing," he said.
"This?" Sera Amy looked pleased and did it again. "My mother taught me, God, I guess from the time my fingers were big enough." She shot a series of cards to her and to him. Quentin AQ was the silent presence in the room, a tall, well-built young man in Security uniform, who sat and watched—a young man altogether capable of breaking a neck in a score of different ways: Grant had no illusions about his chances if he made a move crosswise of Amy Carnath. He had looked to spend the time confined to his room at best and under trank or under restraint at worst; but young sera had instead made every attempt to reassure him: It won't take long, they'll meet with the Bureau, I don't doubt they'll have everything straightened out in a couple of days:and she had finally, after a mid-afternoon lunch, declared that she would teach him to play cards.
He was touched and amused. Young Amy was taking her recently-acquired Alpha license very seriously, and doing outstandingly well: the game did keep his mind off what, if he were half-tranked and locked in solitude, would have been absolute hell—a situation which was still hell, what time he let himself worry whether the plane had landed yet, whether Justin was safe, what was going on with Jordan in Planys.