15
MURDER
To:Graff%
[email protected] From: Carlotta%
[email protected]/orders/sisters/ind
Re: Please forward
The attached file is encrypted. Please wait twelve hours after the time of sending and if you don't hear from me, forward it to Bean. He'll know the key.
It took less than four hours to secure and inspect the entire high command base in Bangkok. Computer experts would be probing to try to find out whom it was that Naresuan had been communicating with outside, and whether he was in fact involved with a foreign power or this gambit was a private venture. When Suriyawong's work with the Prime Minister was finished, he came alone to the barracks where Bean was waiting.
Most of Bean's soldiers had already returned, and Bean had sent most of them to bed. He still watched the news in a desultory fashion--nothing new was being said, so he was interested only in seeing how the talking heads were spinning it. In Thailand, everything was charged with patriotic fervor. Abroad, of course, it was a different story. All the Common broadcasts were taking a more skeptical view that Indian operatives had really made the assassination attempt.
"Why would India want to provoke Thai entry into the war?"
"They know Thailand will come in eventually whether Burma asks them or not. So they felt they had to deprive Thailand of its best Battle School graduate."
"Is one child so dangerous?"
"Maybe you should ask the Formics. If you can find any."
And on and on, everyone trying to appear smart--or at least smarter than the Indian and Thai governments, which was the game the media always played. What mattered to Bean was how this would affect Peter. Was there any mention of the possibility that Achilles was running the show in India? Not a breath. Anything yet about Pakistani troop movements near Iran? The "Bangkok bombing" had driven that slow-moving story off the air. Nobody was giving this any global implications. As long as the I.F. was there to keep the nukes from flying, it was still just politics as usual in south Asia.
Except it wasn't. Everybody was so busy trying to look wise and unsurprised that nobody was standing up and screaming that this whole set of events was completely different from anything that had gone before. The most populous nation in the world has dared to turn its back on a two-hundred-year-old enemy and invade the small, weak country to its east. Now India was attacking Thailand. What did that mean? What was India's goal? What possible benefit could there be?
Why weren't they talking about these things?
"Well," said Suriyawong, "I don't think I'm going to go to sleep very soon."
"Everything all cleaned up?"
"More like everybody who worked closely with the Chakri has been sent home and put under house arrest while the investigation continues."
"That means the entire high command."
"Not really," said Suriyawong. "The best field commanders are out in the field. Commanding. One of them will be brought in as acting Chakri."
"They should give it to you."
"They should, but they won't. Aren't you just a little hungry?"
"It's late."
"This is Bangkok."
"Well, not really," said Bean. "This is a military base."
"When is your friend's flight due in?"
"Morning. Just after dawn."
"Ouch. She's going to be out of sorts. You going to meet her at the airport?"
"I didn't think about it."
"Let's go get dinner," said Suriyawong. "Officers do it all the time. We can take a couple of strike force soldiers with us to make sure we don't get hassled for being children."
"Achilles isn't going to give up on killing me."
"Us. He aimed at us this time."
"He might have a backup."
"Bean, I'm hungry. Are you hungry?" Suriyawong turned to the members of the toon that had been with him. "Any of you hungry?"
"Not really," said one of them. "We ate at the regular time."
"Sleepy," said another.
"Anybody awake enough to go into the city with us?"
Immediately all of them stepped forward.
"Don't ask perfect soldiers whether they want to protect their CO," said Bean.
"Designate a couple to go with us and let the others sleep," said Suriyawong.
"Yes sir," said Bean. He turned to the men. "Honest assessment. Which of you will be least impaired by failing to get enough sleep tonight?"
"Will we be allowed sleep tomorrow?" asked one.
"Yes," said Bean. "So it's a matter of how much it affects you to get off your rhythm."
"I'll be fine." Four others felt the same way. So Bean chose the two nearest. "Two of you keep watch for two more hours, then go back to the normal watch rotation."
Outside the building, with their two bodyguards walking five meters behind them, Bean and Suriyawong finally had a chance to talk candidly. First, though, Suriyawong had to know. "You really keep a regular watch rotation even here at the base?"
"Was I wrong?" asked Bean.
"Obviously not, but . . . you really are paranoid."
"I know I have an enemy who wants me dead. An enemy who happens to be hopping from one powerful position to another."
"More powerful each time," said Suriyawong. "In Russia, he didn't have the power to start a war."
"He might not in India, either," said Bean.
"There's a war," said Suriyawong. "You're saying it isn't his?"
"It's his," said Bean. "But he's probably still having to persuade adults to go along with him."
"Win a few, and they hand you your own army," said Suriyawong.
"Win a few more, and they hand you the country," said Bean. "As Napoleon and Washington showed."
"How many do you have to win to get the world?"
Bean let the question hang.
"Why did he go after us?" asked Suriyawong. "I think you're right, that this operation at least was entirely Achilles'. It's not the kind of thing the Indian government goes for. India is a democracy. Folding children doesn't play well. No way he got approval."
"It might not even be India," said Bean. "We don't really know anything."
"Except that it's Achilles," said Suriyawong. "Think about the stuff that doesn't make sense. A second-rate, obvious campaign strategy that we're probably going to be able to take apart. A nasty bit of business like this that can only soil India's reputation in the rest of the world."
"Obviously he's not acting in India's best interest," said Bean. "But they think he is, if he's really the one who brought off this deal with Pakistan. He's acting for himself. And I can see what he gains by kidnapping Ender's jeesh and by trying to kill you."
"Fewer rivals?"
"No," said Bean. "He makes Battle School grads look like the most important weapons in the war."
"But he's not a Battle School grad."
"He was in Battle School, and he's that age. He doesn't want to have to wait till he grows up to be king of the world. He wants everyone to believe that a child should lead them. If you're worth killing, if Ender's jeesh is worth stealing . . ." It also helps Peter Wiggin, Bean realized. He didn't go to Battle School, but if children are plausible world leaders, his own track record as Locke raises him above any other contenders. Military ability is one thing. Ending the League War was a much stronger qualification. It trumped "psychopathic Battle School expulsee" hands down.
"Do you think that's all?" asked Suriyawong.
"What's all?" asked Bean. He had lost the thread. "Oh, you mean is that enough to explain why Achilles would want you dead?" Bean thought about it. "I don't know. Maybe. But it doesn't tell us why he's setting up India for a much bloodier war than it has to fight."
"What about this," said Suriyawong. "Make everybody fear what war will bring, so they want to strengthen the Hegemony to keep the war from spreading."
"That's fine, except nobody's going to nominate Achilles as Hegemon."
"Good point. Are we ruling out t
he possibility that Achilles is just stupid?"
"Yes, that's not a possibility."
"What about Petra, could she have fooled him into sticking with this obvious but somewhat dumb and wasteful strategy?"
"That is possible, except that Achilles is very sharp at reading people. I don't know if Petra could lie to him. I never saw her lie to anybody. I don't know if she can."
"Never saw her lie to anybody?" asked Suriyawong.
Bean shrugged. "We became very good friends, at the end of the war. She speaks her mind. She may hold something back sometimes, but she tells you she's doing it. No smoke, no mirrors. The door's either open or it's shut."
"Lying takes practice," observed Suriyawong.
"Like the Chakri?"
"You don't get to that position by pure military ability. You have to make yourself look very good to a lot of people. And hide a lot of things you're doing."
"You're not suggesting Thailand's government is corrupt," said Bean.
"I'm suggesting Thailand's government is political. I hope this doesn't surprise you. Because I'd heard that you were bright."
They got a car to take them into town--Suriyawong had always had the authority to requisition a car and a driver, he just never used it till now.
"So where do we eat?" asked Bean. "It's not like I have a restaurant guide with me."
"I grew up in families with better chefs than any restaurant," said Suriyawong.
"So we go to your house?"
"My family lives near Chiang Mai."
"That's going to be a battle zone."
"Which is why I think they're actually in Vientiane, though security rules would keep them from telling me. My father is running a network of dispersed munitions factories." Suriyawong grinned. "I had to make sure I siphoned off some of these defense jobs for my family."
"In other words, he was best man for the task."
"My mother was best for the task, but this is Thailand. Our love affair with Western culture ended a century ago."
They ended up having to ask the soldiers, and they only knew the kind of place they could afford to eat. So they found themselves eating at a tiny all-night diner in a part of town that wasn't the worst, but wasn't the nicest, either. And the whole thing was so cheap it felt practically free.
Suriyawong and the soldiers went down on the food as if it were the best meal they'd ever had. "Isn't this great?" asked Suriyawong. "When my parents had company, and they were eating all the fancy stuff in the dining room with visitors, we kids would eat in the kitchen, the stuff the servants ate. This stuff. Real food."
No doubt that's why the Americans at Yum-Yum in Greensboro loved what they got there, too. Childhood memories. Food that tasted like safety and love and getting rewarded for good behavior. A treat--we're going out. Bean didn't have any such memories, of course. He had no nostalgia for picking up food wrappers and licking the sugar off the plastic and then trying to get at any of it that rubbed off on his nose.
What was he nostalgic for? Life in Achilles' "family"? Battle School? Not likely. And his time with his family in Greece had come too late to be part of his early childhood memories. He liked being in Crete, he loved his family, but no, the only good memories of his childhood were in Sister Carlotta's apartment when she took him off the street and fed him and kept him safe and helped him prepare to take the Battle School tests--his ticket off Earth, to where he'd be safe from Achilles.
It was the only time in his childhood when he felt safe. And even though he didn't believe it or understand it at the time, he felt loved, too. If he could sit down in some restaurant and eat a meal like the ones Sister Carlotta prepared there in Rotterdam, he'd probably feel the way those Americans felt about Yum-Yum, or these Thais felt about this place.
"Our friend Borommakot doesn't really like the food," said Suriyawong. He spoke in Thai, because Bean had picked up the language quite readily, and the soldiers weren't as comfortable in Common.
"He may not like it," said one soldier, "but it's making him grow."
"Soon he'll be as tall as you," said the other.
"How tall do Greeks get?" asked the first.
Bean froze.
So did Suriyawong.
The two soldiers looked at them with some alarm. "What, did you see something?"
"How did you know he was Greek?" asked Suriyawong.
The soldiers glanced at each other and then suppressed their smiles.
"I guess they're not stupid," said Bean.
"We saw all the vids on the Bugger War, we saw your face, you think you're not famous? Don't you know?"
"But you never said anything," said Bean.
"That would have been rude."
Bean wondered how many people made him in Araraquara and Greensboro, but were too polite to say anything.
It was three in the morning when they got to the airport. The plane was due in about six. Bean was too keyed up to sleep. He assigned himself to keep watch, and let the soldiers and Suriyawong doze.
So it was Bean who noticed when a flurry of activity began around the podium about forty-five minutes before the flight was supposed to arrive. He got up and went to ask what was going on.
"Please wait, we'll make an announcement," said the ticket agent. "Where are your parents? Are they here?"
Bean sighed. So much for fame. Suriyawong, at least, should have been recognized. Then again, everyone here had been on duty all night and probably hadn't heard any of the news about the assassination attempt, so they wouldn't have seen Suriyawong's face flashed in the vids again and again. He went back to waken one of the soldiers so he could find out, adult to adult, what was going on.
His uniform probably got him information that a civilian wouldn't have been told. He came back looking grim. "The plane went down," he said.
Bean felt his heart plummet. Achilles? Had he found a way to get to Sister Carlotta?
It couldn't be. How could he know? He couldn't be monitoring every airplane flight in the world.
The message Bean had sent via the computer in the barracks. The Chakri might have seen it. If he hadn't been arrested by then. He might have had time to relay the information to Achilles, or whatever intermediary they used. How else could Achilles have known that Carlotta would be coming?
"It's not him this time," said Suriyawong, when Bean told him what he was thinking. "There are plenty of reasons a plane can drop out of radar."
"She didn't say it disappeared," said the soldier. "She said it went down."
Suriyawong looked genuinely stricken. "Borommakot, I'm sorry." Then Suriyawong went to a telephone and contacted the Prime Minister's office. Being Thailand's pride and joy, who had just survived an assassination attempt, had its benefits. In a very few minutes they were escorted into the meeting room at the airport where officials from the government and the military were conferring, linked to aviation authorities and investigating agencies worldwide.
The plane had gone down over southern China. It was an Air Shanghai flight, and China was treating it as an internal matter, refusing to allow outside investigators to come to the crash site. But air traffic satellites had the story--there was an explosion, a big one, and the plane was in small fragments before any part of it reached the ground. No chance of survivors.
Only one faint hope remained. Maybe she hadn't made a connection somewhere. Maybe she wasn't on board.
But she was.
I could have stopped her, thought Bean. When I agreed to trust the Prime Minister without waiting for Carlotta to arrive, I could have sent word at once to have her go home. But instead he waited around and watched the vids and then went out for a night on the town. Because he wanted to see her. Because he had been frightened and he needed to have her with him.
Because he was too selfish even to think of the danger he was exposing her to. She flew under her own name--she had never done that when they were together. Was that his fault?
Yes. Because he had summoned her with such urgency that s
he didn't have time to do things covertly. She just had the Vatican arrange her flights, and that was it. The end of her life.
The end of her ministry, that's how she'd think about it. The jobs left undone. The work that someone else would have to do.
All he'd done, ever since she met him, was steal time from her, keep her from the things that really mattered in her life. Having to do her work on the run, in hiding, for his sake. Whenever he needed her, she dropped everything. What had he ever done to deserve it? What had he ever given her in return? And now he had interrupted her work permanently. She would be so annoyed. But even now, if he could talk to her, he knew what she'd say.
It was always my choice, she'd say. You're part of the work God gave me. Life ends, and I'm not afraid to return to God. I'm only afraid for you, because you keep yourself such a stranger to him.
If only he could believe that she was still alive somehow. That she was there with Poke, maybe, taking her in now the way she took Bean in so many years ago. And the two of them laughing and reminiscing about clumsy old Bean, who just had a way of getting people killed.
Someone touched his arm. "Bean," whispered Suriyawong. "Bean, let's get you out of here."
Bean focused and realized that there were tears running down his cheeks. "I'm staying," he said.
"No," said Suriyawong. "Nothing's going to happen here. I mean let's go to the official residence. That's where the diplomatic greeyaz is flying."
Bean wiped his eyes on his sleeves, feeling like a little kid as he did it. What a thing to be seen doing in front of his men. But that was just too bad--it would be a far worse sign of weakness to try to conceal it or pathetically ask them not to tell. He did what he did, they saw what they saw, so be it. If Sister Carlotta wasn't worth some tears from someone who owed her as much as Bean did, then what were tears for, and when should they be shed?
There was a police escort waiting for them. Suriyawong thanked their bodyguards and ordered them back to the barracks. "No need to get up till you feel like it," he said.
They saluted Suriyawong. Then they turned to Bean and saluted him. Sharply. In best military fashion. No pity. Just honor. He returned their salute the same way--no gratitude, just respect.
The morning in the official residence was infuriating and boring by turns. China was being intransigent. Even though most of the passengers were Thai businessmen and tourists, it was a Chinese plane over Chinese airspace, and because there were indications that it might have been a ground-to-air missile attack rather than a planted bomb, it was being kept under tight military security.