Shadow of Freedom-eARC (60 page)

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.”