Tranh said drily. "Especially not with enough force to nail the torso to the table-top. Proximate cause of death was a severed dorsal aorta and damage to the pericardium—he bled out and died within seconds, but most of the mess is behind the desk."
George fidgeted with his rings and the camera viewpoint slewed dizzyingly around the room. The scene behind the ambassador's desk was a mess.
Blood had gouted from the wound in his back and splattered across his chair, pooling in viscid puddles beneath his desk. Footprints congealed in the rich carpet, an obscene trail leading toward the door.
"I take it this is important to our mission," said Rachel. "Do we have a full crime scene report? Was the killer apprehended?"
"No and no," Cho said with gloomy satisfaction. "The Office of the Vizier of Morning took control of the investigation outside the embassy, and while the Turku authorities have been polite and helpful to us, they have declined to give us full details of the killing, other than this diorama shot. Note, if you will, the theatrical red nose and bushy moustache a party or parties unknown applied to the Ambassador's face—after he was dead, according to the Vizier's Office. Oh, in case you were wondering, the killer wasn't apprehended. For the sake of face the Vizier's Office rounded up a couple of petty thieves, forced them to confess, then beheaded them in front of the public newsfeeds, but our confidential sources assure us that the real investigation is still continuing. Which brings me to incident number two."
Another wall-sized photograph of chaos. This time it was a roadside disaster—the wreckage of a large vehicle, obviously some sort of luxury people mover, lay scattered across a road, uniformed emergency crews and rescue vehicles all around it. Blue sheets covered misshapen mounds to either side. Much of the debris was scorched; some of it was still smoking.
"This was an embassy limousine, taking her excellency Simonette Black to a conference on resettlement policy for refugee populations in Bonn, the capital of the Frisian Foundation, a confederation of independent states on Eiger's World. Which, unlike al-Turku, is a Deutsch McWorld with no real history of political violence other than a couple of wars fought over oil fields and states' rights a century or two ago."
George pointed at some bushes to one side of the road, and the screen obligingly zoomed. Something gleamed: "That is a reflector post for an infrared beam. If we look at the source"—the viewpoint flipped dizzyingly into the sky then back down, 180 degrees away from the post—"we find this." A green box, with a round hole in its front, above a complex optical sight and some kind of rubber mat. The box, too, looked scorched. "I'm told that's a disposable anti-armor missile launcher, hypervelocity, with a two-stage penetrator jet designed to punch through ceramic armor or high-Tesla fields. The poor people in the limousine—Black, her wife, their driver, the charge d'immigration, and two bodyguards—didn't stand a chance. It was stolen from an army depot one week before the incident. It was armed by remote control and rigged to fire when the beam was interrupted. I'm told that the plastic object underneath the missile launcher is an, ah, whoopee cushion. A rubber bladder that emits a flatulent sound when sat upon."
Rachel looked down at her pad. To her surprise, she realized she'd begun to doodle on it with her stylus in ink transfer mode. Pictures of mushroom clouds and Mach waves knocking over groundscrapers and arcologies.
She glanced up. "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence," she said.
"Any more?"
George's shoulders fell. He looked very old for a moment, even though Rachel knew he was seven years her junior. "Yes," he said. Another diorama filled the wall. "I've been saving this until last. This is the Honorable Maureen Davis, ambassador to the United Nations of Earth in Geneva." Gail looked away, visibly upset, and Rachel wondered distantly if she was going to cry. Violent death didn't just strip the victims of their dignity, it insulted the survivors. And it was a personal insult to Rachel. We were supposed to protect her! An attack on a visiting diplomat reflected on the honor of the nation or coalition that played host to them. And this—
"Did we let this happen on our watch?" she demanded angrily. "After knowing that two other ambassadors had died in questionable circumstances?" She closed the dossier in front of her and flattened it against the table, pressing until her knuckles turned white.
"No." George took a deep breath. "She was the first to die—just the last for us to be aware of. At first we penciled it in as a simple murder—horrible, but not special. Unlike the other two incidents we have a complete crime scene breakdown and we're pursuing the murderer with every resource at our disposal. We are"—he took another breath—"appalled and outraged that this has happened. But more than that, we're very much afraid that it's going to happen again. Tranh, could you explain?"
Tranh stood up again and began to recite in a flat monotone that suggested that he, too, was trying to hold down the lid on his outrage. "Ambassador Davis was discovered in the state you see by a housekeeper maintenance contractor who called to deal with a fault alert by the house cleaning 'bot.
The amah was confused by, well, a conflict between its recognizer for human beings and its garbage collection monitor. That doesn't happen very often these days, but Ambassador Davis had an antique that still had a heuristic support contract in force. Embassy security admitted the maintenance contractor and immediately discovered the ambassador in this state. They immediately requested our assistance—unlike their counterparts on Turku." His voice quivered with outrage as he added, "The killer used a bungee cord for a ligature."
Foul play? That's one way of putting it, Rachel observed. Ambassadors did not, as a rule, hang themselves in the stairwell of their own residences using rubberized ropes. Nor did they do so after pinioning their hands behind them, not to mention fracturing the backs of their skulls on mysteriously missing blunt objects.
"Ah yes, she shot herself three times in the back of the head and jumped out of the sixth floor window just to make us look bad," she muttered, drawing a wide-eyed look of confusion from Gail. "When did this happen relative to the others? In the empire time defined by the Moscow embassy causal channels, if you've got the figures. That might tell us something."
"The order was"—George flipped pages in a separate file—"Ambassador Davis at datum zero, followed by Simonette Black at T plus fourteen days, six hours, three minutes. Then Ambassador Pendelton thirty-four days, nineteen hours and fifty-two minutes later." He gazed at Rachel tiredly.
"Any other questions?"
"Yes." She leaned back in her chair, tapping her stylus on the cover of her briefing file. "Are Turku and the, uh, Frisian Foundation coordinating their investigations? Are they even aware of the other assassinations?"
"No and no." George inclined his head slightly. "You have more questions.
Let's hear them, and your reasoning."
"All right." Rachel sat up straight and looked at Gail. "You might not want to hear this."
"I can take it." She looked back, angry and bewildered. "I don't have to like it."
"Okay." Rachel tapped the file in front of her. "As the man said, once is happenstance, twice might be coincidence, but three times is enemy action.
We have a very nasty situation evolving, in which there exists a dwindling pool of assets—ambassadors—such that if the total drops below three, 800
million people will die. From an initial nine survivors, three have been murdered in the past three months. I assume the rest are under heavy guard—"
"Wherever possible," George murmured.
"—But we basically have a crisis on our hands. Someone has figured out how to kill 800 million birds with just six stones. Leaving aside the killer's evident penchant for cruel practical jokes, we know absolutely nothing about who they are and what motivates them. In fact, what we appear to know may actually be deliberate deception. And we're the only people who are treating these assassinations as part of a big picture, rather than isolated killings."
"That's essentially correct," said Tranh. "There are other investigative measures we are taking, but"—he shrugged, looking unhappy—"it takes time."
"Well then." Rachel licked her lips, which had become unpleasantly dry. "As I see it, our ideal outcome is to convince them to issue the abort code to the bombers immediately, before any more of them die. But right now they'll probably view any such request with extreme suspicion—the murders could be seen as a conspiracy to force them to issue the code. Or we could prove to them that the New Dresdeners didn't do the dirty deed and show them who did—if we have any idea."
She nodded when Cho shook his head. "I was afraid of that. The other option is to stake out a goat, wait for the assassins to show up, and try to trace them back to their masters. But we have a mess of motives at work here. Someone seems to want to ensure that the Muscovite weapons destroy New Dresden, and I've got to ask, why? Who could possibly benefit from wiping out one—or maybe even two—planets?" She glanced around the table.
"That's essentially where we've got to," George said heavily, "except for the final part."
"Explain." She leaned forward attentively.
"We don't have time to stake them all out. Given the current attrition rate, we've got to face the risk of losing four more ambassadors in the next month. We haven't caught a single assassin, so we don't know who's doing it. So tell me what you deduce from that fact."
"That we're in the shit," Rachel said in a low monotone. She leaned forward tensely. "Let's look at this as a crime in progress. If we shelve the means and opportunity questions, who's got a motive? Who could possibly gain by arranging for Moscow to bomb the crap out of Dresden in thirty-five years'
time?"
She held up a hand and began counting off fingers. "One: a third party who hates Dresden. I think we can take that as a non sequitur; nobody is ever crazy enough to want to exterminate an entire planet. At least, nobody who's that crazy ever gets their hands on the means to do it." Well, virtually nobody, she reminded herself, flashing back a week. Idi would have done it—if he'd had an R-bomb. But he didn't. So … "Two: a faction among the Muscovite exiles who really, really hates Dresden—enough to commit murder, murder of their own people, just to make sure. Three: someone who wants to strike a negotiating position of some kind. It could be blackmail, for example, and the ransom note hasn't arrived yet. Four: it's a continent smasher. Could be a really nasty bunch of folks have decided to make sure it goes home, as a prelude to a, uh, rescue and reconstruction mission of a rather permanent nature."
"You're saying it could be some other government that wants to take advantage of the situation?" Gail looked aghast.
"That's realpolitik for you." Rachel shrugged. "I'm not saying it is, but … do we have any candidates?" She raised an eyebrow at Tranh.
"Possibly." He frowned. "Among the neighbors … I can't see the New Republic doing that, can you?"
Rachel shook her head. "They're out for the count."
"Then, hmm. Forget Turku, forget Malacia, forget Septagon. None of them have an expansionist government except Septagon, and they're not interested in anything with a primary that masses more than point zero five of Sol or comes with inhabitable planets. There's Newpeace, but they're still in a mess from the civil war. And Eiger isn't likely. Tonto, that's another of those weird semiclosed dictatorships. They might have an angle on it. But it's not anything obvious, is it?"
Rachel frowned. "There seem to be a couple of dictatorships in this sector, aren't there? Funny: they aren't normally stable enough to last … "
"There's some kind of weird political ideology, calling themselves the ReMastered. Tonto went ReMastered forty or fifty years ago," offered Jane.
"Don't know much about them: they're not nice people." She shivered.
"Why do you ask?"
Rachel's frown deepened. "If you can dig anything up I'd appreciate hearing it. George, you're holding something back, aren't you?"
The ambassador sat up slightly, then nodded. "Yes, I am." He glanced round the table.
"You probably figured out why I wanted you; it's because none of you had any conceivable link either to Moscow or New Dresden. Which, incidentally, is where we're en route. It so happens that Ambassador Elspeth Morrow is in residence in Sarajevo, and Harrison Baxter, former trade minister of the Muscovite government—and the highest surviving government officer, he's also on the code schedule—is there, too. He was sent just before the incident, to attempt to resolve the trade dispute. I strongly suspect that they're the next logical target, being a two-for-one hit. Our cover story—for everyone outside this room—is that we're here to discuss the R-bomb situation with Morrow and Baxter.
"The real task in hand is somewhat different. It's to keep them alive and if possible capture one of the killers and backtrack to their masters. Which is where you come in, Rachel. Tranh, your job is to brief the embassy guard and the Dresdener Interior Ministry special security police and act as external security liaison. Gail, you and I are going to talk directly to the Minister and the Ambassador and impress the urgency of the situation upon them. You handle protocol, I'll handle diplomacy. Pritkin, you're our switchboard and front office. Jane, I need you on back office, coordinating any intel we get from home about the circumstances of the murders.
Rachel, you've got a nasty, suspicious mind. I want you to try and set up a trap for the killers—assuming they surface. And I've, well, got a little surprise."
"Surprise," she mimicked. "Uh-huh. One of those surprises?"
"Those?" echoed Jane.
"Those." Rachel grimaced. "Spill it, George."
Cho took a deep breath. "For you, I've got a covert job in mind. You're about the same size and build as Ambassador Morrow. You fill in the dotted line."
"Oh. Oh no." Rachel shook her head. "You can't do this to me!"
"Oh yes?" Tranh's smile wasn't entirely friendly. "What was that you were saying earlier about wanting to nail the culprits?"