Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Thirty-Five

“I think we should have another little chat with Vice Commissioner Hongbo, Ma’am,” Cynthia Lecter said.

“Not exactly the most enjoyable thing I could imagine doing,” Michelle Henke replied dryly.

She reached out a long arm for the coffee carafe and replenished her cup. Then she sat back on her own side of the breakfast table, nursing the cup in both hands, and regarded her chief of staff through the wisp of steam rising from the black liquid. They’d been in the Meyers System for over two T-weeks now, and things had been going smoothly enough to make her nervous. In her experience, the calmer and more orderly things seemed, the more likely it was thatsomething was lurking just beneath the surface to leap out and bite one on the posterior. And since Lecter was still wearing the intelligence officer’s hat as well as the chief of staff’s hat, she was the one responsible for digging under that surface and finding the lurker before it struck.

“I presume you have a specific reason for that suggestion?” Michelle asked after a moment, and Lecter nodded.

“We’re turning up some things I’d like to try on him.” The chief of staff was a fidgeter, and she picked up her grapefruit spoon, twirling it between the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand while she spoke. “I think he could tell us a few things we’d really like to know.”

“I’m sure he could be a fount of information on any number of subjects.” Michelle shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “He was second in command of an entire protectorate sector. Somebody like that’s bound to know where a lotof bodies are buried.”

“I know.” Lecter thumped the bowl of the spoon on the white breakfast tablecloth, drumming gently. “The thing is, we’re picking up some suggestions that he might have what you could call a friendly relationship with Manpower and Mesa in general.”

“And?” Michelle’s eyes narrowed.

“I know that’s hardly surprising.” Lecter grimaced. “I sometimes think the majority of Frontier Security officials have ‘friendly relationships’ with Manpower. Hell, Ma’am, they’ve got ‘friendly relationships’ with every dirty transstellar! After all, it’s the illegal transstellars—like Manpower and the rest of that bunch in Mesa—that pay the best when they manage to put somebody in their pocket.”

“Exactly. So what is it about Hongbo that suggests we should pay special attention to him?”

“Well, with Kowalski helping to point the way, our friends here in Pine Mountain have managed to break into a lot of people’s financial records. Specifically, they’re well on their way to opening up virtually all of Hongbo’s, Verrocchio’s, Palgani’s, and Kasomoulis’ private little books, and there’s some interesting reading in there.”

“No! Really?” Michelle said dryly, and Lecter chuckled.

Saverio Palgani was—or had been, at any rate, prior to Tenth Fleet’s arrival—the Meyers System manager for Brindle Star, Ltd., of Hirochi. His position in the sector capital meant he’d actually been in charge of all of Brindle Star’s operations in the entire Madras Sector, which had made him a very big fish, indeed.

Theophilia Kasomoulis had fulfilled the same role for Newman & Sons, headquartered in the Core System of Eris, and Brindle Star and Newman & Sons had divided most of the Madras Sector between themselves as their private possession. Brindle Star controlled effectively the entire sector’s interstellar shipping and financial transactions, while Newman & Sons controlled resource extraction and consumer manufacturing and distribution. Palgani and Kasomoulis were undoubtedly the two wealthiest individuals in the entire Meyers System, but Michelle had to admit they seemed to have been less rapacious than their counterparts in many another protectorate star system. Apparently they’d at least been enlightened enough to realize that while the sort of slash-and-burn exploitation practiced in other portions of the Verge might return a higher short-term profit, long-term profitability required at least a modicum of local prosperity.

Not that that made them any great paragons of virtue, she reminded herself.

Yeargin Kowalski, on the other hand, was a local businessman and banker. He’d had to deal with the transstellars, especially with Brindle Star, but he’d focused more on the more marginal deals too small to attract Palgani’s attention. In some ways, Michelle supposed, Kowalski had followed in Brindle Star’s wake, gleaning the predator’s leftovers. Another way to look at it, though, was that he’d provided capital to a host of locally owned entrepreneurships which would have been completely squeezed out by the transstellars without him.

When Prime Minister Montview began constructing a genuine government, he’d needed a finance minister to replace the totally incompetent (and totally corrupt) crony Palgani had insisted hold that position in the “official” government. Kowalski had been on his short list from the outset, and nothing anyone had turned up in his background had disqualified him. In fact, he’d been a highly popular choice among those same local entrepreneurs, and there’d never been the least suggestion of dishonesty or corruption on his part.

Because of his dealings with Palgani and Kasomoulis, on the other hand, Kowalski had had a very good idea of where to start when it came to exhuming the transstellars’ books. Not the official books which they’d kept primarily for tax assessment, shareholder earnings calculations, and writeoff purposes, but the real books, the ones which detailed every sordid detail of their actual operations.

Helen Sanderson, originally the Pine Mountain Police Department’s second ranking officer, had been named to head the new Royal Police whose jurisdiction spanned the entire star system. Her immediate superior had been unavailable for the position, since he’d been under arrest at the time and was probably going to spend the next several T-years as a guest of the Meyers penal system. With Kowalski to guide her, and the enthusiastic support of Janice Hannover, a Meyers realtor and commercial farmer who’d been strong-armed into taking the position of attorney general, Sanderson had launched an aggressive probe of the entire “black economy.”

Aside from providing a handful of computer techs to assist in the effort, Tenth Fleet had been perfectly happy to stand back and let the locals deal with their own dirty laundry. It was the last thing Michelle wanted to get involved in, yet they’d been sharing their findings with Lecter from the beginning, and Michelle had always realized Sanderson and Kowalski were almost certain to eventually unearth something with implications for her.

“All right,” she said. “Give me the quick summary version.”

“You want to hear about Palgani and Kasomoulis? Or just about Verrocchio and Hongbo?”

“Which do you think I should be hearing about?”

Lecter pondered for a moment, drumming more loudly with the grapefruit spoon until Michelle reached across and snatched it out of her hand with a glare. The chief staff looked at her for a moment, then grinned.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “And as to your question, eventually I think you’re going to be very interested in what we’ve discovered about Palgani and Kasomoulis. I know I wouldn’t have believed how the hell much money they could siphon off.” She shook her head. “I mean, we’ve always known the amounts have to be huge in any protectorate system, but these two—! Let’s put it this way, neither of them was ever going to reach Klaus Hauptman levels, but both of them were—conservatively—multibillionaires. And the really neat thing about it is that it looks like a lot of what they squirreled away was illegal even under the letter of Solly law. Everybody knew they were doing it, of course, but it was illegal, and that means Hanover and Sanderson are in a perfect position to seize their ill-gotten gains, completely irrespective of what the Crown ultimately does about nationalizing Brindle Star and Newman & Sons’ local assets.”

The chief of staff’s smile was positively seraphic, and Michelle chuckled evilly.

“You’re right, I am going to want to hear all about that eventually. Or at least my nasty side is. The best way to deal with someone like those two is to leave them without a pot to piss in. I mean, a little prison time on top of it would be nice, but taking away all their toys is even better.”

“I know.”

Lecter smiled for a few more moments, but then the smile faded.

“I know,” she repeated. “But aside from the fact that it looks like Brindle Star was probably carrying the occasional illicit cargo for Manpower and some of the other Mesan transstellars—they had a reciprocal agreement with Jessyk, for example—what Sanderson and Kowalski have turned up about them so far is less immediately important then what they’re finding about Verrocchio and Hongbo. Especially Hongbo.”

“You said that already—that Hongbo’s a more important player from our perspective than Verrocchio,” Michelle observed. “I find that a little surprising. Why buy the vice commissioner when you’ve already bought the commissioner?”

“That surprised me at first, too,” Lecter admitted. “Then I got to thinking about it. How often have both of us seen someone else being the power behind the throne—especially in a bureaucratic relationship? From the looks of things, Hongbo’s made quite a bit of his career on the basis of ‘managing’ Verrocchio. And I don’t think he did all of that managing just for his superiors in the Office of Frontier Security, either.”

“Ah?” Michelle took another sip of coffee and raised both eyebrows.

“Ah,” Lecter said with a nod. Then she looked at the piece of silverware her admiral had taken away from her. “Can I please have my spoon back, Ma’am?” she said almost plaintively. “You know how much better I think when I’ve got something to do with my hands.”

Michelle considered her forbiddingly for several moments.

“You can have it back if you promise not to drum with it,” she said after a moment. “One tap, though, and—”

She drew the tip of her left thumb across her throat in a slicing motion and glowered at Lecter.

“I promise to be good, Ma’am.”

“All right then.” Michelle slid the spoon back across the table to her. “Now continue with your explanation.”

Lecter recovered the spoon with a broad smile and started twirling it again, but her blue eyes were serious as she tipped back in her chair.

“Verrocchio’s records were easier to break into than Hongbo’s,” she began. “The encryption wasn’t as good, and apparently he only had two or three personal passwords that he reused a lot.” She grimaced. “Hongbo, on the other hand, had top-flight encryption—by civilian Solly standards, at least—and he was a lot more inventive when it came to generating passwords. We still haven’t gotten into some of his files, and at least one entire folder went up in smoke on us.” She shook her head. “It looks to the computer geeks like he got some high-powered outside help. The kind of help that only makes itself available when you’re hiding something it doesn’t want found, either.”

“And Verrocchio’s records didn’t have that level of sophistication?” Michelle asked thoughtfully.

“No, they didn’t. Despite the fact that Verrocchio was dealing directly with Manpower, and that he’d been doing it long before the situation with Monica ever blew up in Sir Aivars’ face. You’d have thought if Manpower was going to provide technical assistance to one of them, it would have provided it to both of them, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, you would. Unless, of course, one of them was dealing with someone a layer or two up from Manpower,” Michelle said slowly.

“That’s what got me interested in Hongbo,” Lecter admitted. “More interested in him than in Verrocchio, I mean. And when I got interested in him, I put a team on Verrocchio’s correspondence files, looking specifically for memos generated by Hongbo. Or sent by him to Hongbo, for that matter.”

“That must have produced the odd petabyte,” Michelle said dryly, considering the bureaucratic morass of the Solarian League’s civil services.

“There were a bunch of them, Ma’am,” Lecter agreed. “I had them filtered by date and also using strings like ‘Monica’ and ‘Byng’ or ‘New Tuscany,’ though. That reduced the overall sample in a hurry.”

“All right, I’m with you so far.” Michelle leaned back, sipping coffee, and reached for the last cinnamon bun.

“There was still a lot of garbage-in-garbage-out, Ma’am, but a pattern emerged. Back before Monica, or rather in the buildup to Monica, Hongbo was consistently pushing Verrocchio to be ‘more proactive’ even in his official memos. We’ve turned up a side file of private correspondence as well, and he’s even more persistent there. There’s no proof he knew everything Manpower and Technodyne were up to—no direct evidence he knew about Nordbrandt or Westman, for example—but it’s obvious both of them did know about the battlecruisers Technodyne was supplying to Monica. And from their private correspondence, it’s equally obvious both of them were scared to death when they saw what happened to those battlecruisers. You wouldn’t believe how much time, effort, and bandwidth they spent—Verrocchio, especially—on proving to Frontier Security HQ back on Old Terra that whatever happened in Monica, it wasn’t their fault! I suspect a few of the official memos they’d exchanged before it all went south on them got fed to the chip shredder at that point, as a matter of fact.

“But what’s even more interesting to me is that Hongbo, who apparently had been carrying water for Manpower, at least to judge from the memos he was sending Verrocchio, put the brakes on big-time after Monica.” The blonde-haired chief of staff shrugged, still twirling her spoon. “Nothing too surprising about that, I suppose, but then, just before Josef Byng and Sandra Crandall got sent out here, the tone of this correspondence shifts again. All of a sudden he’s subtly encouraging Verrocchio to ‘cooperate’ with Byng. And if you read the official minutes of the meetings between Verrocchio, Hongbo, and Byng before New Tuscany—and between those two and Crandall, before she set off for Spindle—there’s a definite subtext.”

“Subtext?” Michelle repeated.

“Yes, Ma’am.” Lecter nodded. “We’ve both been around enough bureaucrats, civilian and Navy alike, to know how it’s done. The two of them—Verrocchio’s the one taking point, but from my reading, Hongbo was probably the one who was actually steering—double-teamed Byng and probably Crandall into doing exactly what they did. Not only that, they maneuvered Byng and Crandall into making their decisions against Verrocchio’s official recommendations.”

She paused, and silence hovered for the better part of two minutes.

“You know any court of law would chuck that straight out the airlock,” Michelle said at last, her tone mild. “I haven’t looked at the memos myself, of course, but from what you’ve just said, it sounds like Mr. Verrocchio and Mr. Hongbo must be pretty good at the bureaucratic fan dance.”

“I’m inclined to agree, Ma’am. Both of them covered themselves pretty well, at least in terms of ever coming right out in any official setting and saying anything someone could nail them for. And given what they did say, if I hadn’t already been suspicious about Hongbo for other reasons, I probably would have simply accepted that Verrocchio, as Hongbo’s boss, had to be making the decisions. And he clearly was the one making the final decisions. But it’s increasingly apparent to me that he was dancing to Hongbo’s piping. And there’s another thing, too. There’s a Mesan diplomat—a fairly senior trade attaché by the name of Ottweiler, Valery Ottweiler—whose name appears on Hongbo’s calendar of appointments with an interesting frequency. There’s no record of Ottweiler ever having had a private meeting with Verrocchio, but I’ve found over a dozen between him and Hongbo.”

Lecter paused again, and Michelle considered her expression.

“You want to go ahead and let that other shoe drop now, Cindy?” she inquired.

“What other shoe?” Lecter asked innocently.

“The one that doesn’t have anything to do with memos between Hongbo and Verrocchio. The one you found by following some kind of wild, totally illogical hunch.” Michelle snorted. “I’ve known you a long time, you know, and that talent for being…creatively erratic is one reason I wanted you for my chief of staff. So spill it.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Lecter grinned, but then she sobered. “Although, to be fair, it wasn’t really following a hunch in this case. I just took all the names I’d come up with and threw them into the filters for all the records we’ve been breaking into. Including the Gendarmerie’s.”

“Oh?” Michelle cocked her head. “That sounds interesting.”

“Oh, it was, Ma’am. It was! Because it would appear Brigadier Yucel didn’t believe in keeping her nominal superiors fully apprised of her surveillance activities. In fact, she was bugging both Hongbo and Verrocchio. We haven’t turned up anything especially incriminating in the official surveillance files on them—not yet, anyway—but we’re getting into her more secure files now. The ones she kept for herself, not the official record. And yesterday evening, my cyber forensics team turned up at least two meetings that never officially happened—meetings between Verrocchio, Hongbo, Yucel herself, Ottweiler, Volkhart Kalokainos, Izrok Levakonic, Aldona Anisimovna, and Isabel Bardasano. And both of which happened here in Meyers, a couple of T-months before Technodyne offered all those battlecruisers to President Tyler.”

Michelle straightened abruptly in her chair, her eyes very narrow, as those names registered. Volkhart Kalokainos was the eldest son of Heinrich Kalokainos, the CEO and majority stockholder of Kalokainos Shipping, one of the largest—and most violently anti-Manticoran—Solarian shipping houses. The late (and not particularly lamented) Izrok Levakonic had been the Technodyne executive who’d served as that transstellar’s contact with President Roberto Tyler and the Monican Navy. Aldona Anisimovna had been the Mesan Alignment’s contact in New Tuscany before Admiral Byng’s disastrous confrontation with the Royal Manticoran Navy. And last but not least, as the pièce de résistance, there was Isabel Bardasano—the woman Jack McBryde had identified as the second in command of all of the Mesan Alignment’s intelligence operations.

“My God, Cindy,” she said after a moment, her tone considerably milder than she actually felt, “don’t you think you could possibly have trotted that last little datum out first?”

“I could have,” Lecter agreed. “But I wanted to lay out how we got from Point A to Point B. And I especially wanted to lay the groundwork for why I think Hongbo was more fully plugged into the Alignment than Verrocchio. I think both of them could probably give us a lot of really valuable information, but I also think Hongbo’s going to be the richer vein if we can figure out how to mine him properly.”

“I can see that,” Michelle conceded. “Of course, there’s a part of me that’s inclined to just drag the bastard in and sweat it out of him. Somehow I’m not feeling all warm and gooey about Frontier Security at the moment. I think I can probably deal quite well with a few little human rights violations where these two scumbags are concerned.”

“Never any of Duchess Harrington’s Ballroom friends around when you need one, is there, Ma’am?” Lecter said wryly.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Michelle said. “Besides, if we really needed someone to whistle up a Ballroom fanatic to loom threateningly in the background, we could probably ask Ensign Zilwicki to come up with one. Assuming we hadn’t sent her off to Mobius with Aivars, that is.”

“We could always bring in a fake fanatic,” Lecter pointed out. “I’ve done a personnel search, and we’ve got better than thirty ex-genetic slaves, complete with tongue barcodes, assigned to the units we’ve got right here in Meyers. I’m sure any one of them—hell, all of them!—would be prepared to impersonate a Ballroom representative, show our OFS friends their tongues, and suggest it would be a good idea to tell us whatever we want to hear. In the most friendly possible way, of course.”

“Tempting, Cindy. Very tempting,” Michelle admitted. “In fact, that might be something to keep in reserve. Right now, though, I think we might try subtle first.”

“Subtle, Ma’am?” Lecter repeated, regarding her admiral with a doubtful expression.

“I have been known to do subtle upon occasion,” Michelle told her in quelling tones. “Not very often, I’ll admit. And it’s not my favorite way of getting things done. This isn’t really a case that’s suitable for shooting them all and letting God sort them out later, though, so I think I can restrain my homicidal inclinations as long as it’s in a good cause.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Never doubted it, Ma’am.”

“I think you’d better let this one go before you get into real trouble, Captain,” Michelle said repressively.

Lecter grinned at her, and Michelle shook her head. Then she continued.

“I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to working with Alfredo and Master Sergeant Cognasso,” she pointed out. “And it’s entirely possible that neither Hongbo nor Verrocchio have heard the reports about furry lie detectors yet. So if you happened to be able to prime me with the data you’ve pulled out of these hacked files of yours, and if I happened to invite those two estimable gentlemen in for a private chat—just me and my furry little pet, Alfredo, and possibly a Marine or two for security, like Cognasso—we could probably learn a lot.”

“You mean by not confronting him directly? By just asking leading questions and letting Alfredo monitor his responses?”

“Maybe, but probably not.” Michelle shook her head. “It’s not like Alfredo can tell us what he’s actually thinking; he can only tell us when he knows a two-leg is lying or telling the truth. I could probably nibble around the edges asking indirect questions, but if I’m really going to get confirmation, I’m going to have to go more directly to the heart of things. What I can do, though, is to let him think he’s getting away with lying to me when he’s not. I can probably pull a lot out of him that way—a lot more than we’d get voluntarily if he knew we were closing in on him.”

“That’s probably true, Ma’am,” Lecter said. “On the other hand, and with all due respect, you’re not really a trained interrogator.”

“No, I’m not. And your point is—?”

“Do you think it might be better to let someone who is a trained interrogator ask the questions and work with Alfredo? Someone who might pick up on some of the body cues you might miss and use what she picks up to guide her follow-on questions?”

Michelle considered thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged.

“You may have a point. In fact, you do have one. But I’m the one who’s worked with Alfredo so far, and I’m not sure we’ve got anyone else in Tenth Fleet who can actually read treecat sign. Aside from me and Cognasso, at any rate, and I doubt he’s a trained interrogator, either.”

“No, that’s true enough,” Lecter acknowledged.

“I still think it’s a good idea, though,” Michelle said. “In fact, I think it’s an excellent one. And workable, too.”

“How, Ma’am?”

“Simple.” Michelle shrugged again, this time with an evil smile. “We bug my cabin. We put in an audiovisual pickup without mentioning it to our guests. We park a trained interrogator in front of the monitors, and we give me a miniature earbug. The interrogator watches their expressions and body language, and if she sees anything, she passes it on to me over the earbug. Meanwhile, I ask the questions, and Alfredo sits on his perch behind my current victim and signs anything he picks up to me. What do you think?”

Lecter considered her reply. Michelle’s suggestion did seem to cover most of the bases. And, possibly more to the point, Lecter knew her admiral. Michelle Henke was going to do this herself. That was already settled, cast in stone, as far as the Countess of Gold Peak was concerned. So—

“I’m not certain it’s the absolutely best way to go about it, Ma’am, but I think it should work. In fact, it should work one hell of a lot better than any conventional interrogation technique I can come up with. And I’d really, really like to be able to find some additional confirmation of this Alignment’s existence. A Solly confirmation, not just something manufactured out of our Manticoran paranoia.”

“Oh, don’t forget the part that’s manufactured out of our Machiavellian Manticoran imperialism, either,” Michelle said sourly. “Still, I take your point. And I agree.”

“And best of all,” Lecter’s smile was every bit as evil as Michelle’s had been, “if we do it right?” She chuckled. “The bastards won’t even realize we’re onto them until we hand them over for trial. I can hardly wait to see their expressions then.”