Dorfman was still sitting there, alone, when the other three cars roared off into the night.

Bailey had very much not wanted to be the last one to arrive at the conference room. Unfortunately, he was.

"Sit," Daasaa said quietly, indicating the far side of the table from where he and Halaak were seated.

"Yes, Your Eminence," Bailey said. Poirot and Ramirez, he noted sourly, had thoughtfully left the seat between them empty, thereby putting Bailey in the middle where he could bear the brunt of Ryqril attention. "My apologies for my tardiness."

Neither Ryq replied, but merely waited in silence until he had seated himself. "Now," Daasaa said, his eyes glittering. "Ex'lain."

Bailey took a careful breath. "They outsmarted us, Your Eminence," he said reluctantly. "I wish it were otherwise. But it's not."

"That is not su'icient," Halaak growled. "There is a traitor. Who?"

"No one betrayed the mission, Your Eminence," Bailey said. "At least, no one in this room."

"Yet they identi'ied the s'y yae 'lanted," Daasaa pointed out. "How did they dae that?"

"I don't know," Bailey admitted. "Something he said or did, I suppose, or maybe something about his appearance that gave him away."

Beside Bailey, Ramirez stirred. "It seems to me that we know one likely candidate for traitor, Your Eminence," he said. "General Poirot is the one—"

"I did not betray the mission," Poirot bit out angrily. "And let me remind you that of all of us in this room, I'm the one who's been under the most complete observation. How could I possibly have communicated anything to the blackcollars without half of Athena knowing about it?"

"There is reason to General 'Oirot's argunent," Daasaa agreed. "What o' yae, Lieutenant Ranirez?"

"I couldn't have had anything to do with this, Your Eminence," Ramirez said, his voice steady. "I didn't even know about Colonel Bailey's spy until after the blackcollars left him behind."

"Those rogue spotters claimed to be from your office," Poirot accused.

Ramirez glared at him— "They weren't rogue," Bailey put in before he could say anything. "That was why I was late, Your Eminences. I was getting the full transcript of the pilots' interrogation."

"Yae ha' it?" Daasaa demanded.

"Yes, Your Eminence," Bailey said, pulling a set of papers from his folder and handing it across the table.

For a few minutes Daasaa and Halaak poured over the report in silence. Bailey waited, listening to his thudding heart and wondering if Poirot and Ramirez were sweating as much as he was. He rather expected they were.

At last, Daasaa looked up. "There is no sign they rere traitors," he agreed grudgingly. " 'Ery rell. Let us exanine hor the 'lackcollars o'tained the s'otter 'ekencies." He looked at Poirot. "And General 'Oirot's authorization code."

"Actually, it wasn't General Poirot's personal code," Bailey said. "It was simply a general authorization which any of a thousand people would have access to, both here in Athena and in Boulder."

"And rich o' these thousand is the traitor?" Halaak demanded.

"I'm afraid we don't yet know," Bailey had to admit. "But we do know now that it was definitely Anne Silcox who was the one ordering them around. We've started an analysis on who in Athena or Boulder might have crossed paths with her in the past few months."

Daasaa made a strange sounding rumbling noise. "Dae yae know all o' Silcox's novenents in that 'eriod?"

Bailey winced. "No, Your Eminence, we don't."

"Then such analysis is unlikely to 'e 'ery usekhul, is it?"

"Probably not," Bailey conceded.

"Meanwhile, we also need to worry about what else this spy of theirs has told them," Ramirez said. "Isn't there some way to tell who else they've hit with this damned Whiplash?"

"We're still analyzing the tests we ran on General Poirot," Bailey said. "So far, we haven't found any detectable changes in his biochemistry."

"That's handy," Ramirez muttered.

"For someone," Bailey agreed grimly, looking back at the Ryqril. "And we can't just suspend or lock up all the possibilities, either—we don't have enough alternates to step into their places. Everyday operations would grind to a halt."

"I expect we're going to have to run everyone in the government through a second round of loyaltyconditioning,"

Poirot said. "Myself being first, of course," he added, looking at Ramirez.

"That rill not hel' us now," Halaak growled. "It rill take tae long."

"Actually, time may not be as short as we thought," Bailey said, bracing himself. Given the mood the Ryqril were in, there was no way to predict how they were going to react to this particular bit of news.

"It appears that our missing blackcollar did indeed come to Denver this morning."

The two Ryqril exchanged looks. "Yae are certain?" Daasaa asked.

"Yes," Bailey said, on solid ground for a change. "The various recordings clearly show all five blackcollars were present during the rescue, the four from Plinry and Kanai."

"Then he is not in Aegis," Halaak rumbled.

"Aegis?" Poirot echoed, turning startled eyes on Bailey.

"No, Your Eminence, he's not," Bailey confirmed, throwing a warning look at Poirot as he silently cursed Halaak's careless tongue. He'd worked very hard to make sure the fact that they knew about Aegis's back door stayed strictly between the three of them. Now, Poirot and Ramirez knew it, too.

"'Erha's that neans they no longer need the 'ase," Daasaa said, his tone suggesting the kind of fate that Bailey could expect if the opportunity to get into Aegis had slipped through their fingers.

"I'm certain they'll need to go back in," Bailey said quickly. "Whatever the blackcollars came here for, this rescue couldn't have been more than just a little detour. They're still going to need whatever resources are in there."

"'Erha's," Daasaa said again. "Re shall see."

They'd found some food, and they'd had some rest; and now Foxleigh stood beside Jensen at the end of the road. "So this is what you came all this way for?" he murmured, his voice hushed with a reverence he hadn't realized he could still feel. "This is what you hiked through the wilderness and fought bears to get to?"

"This is it," Jensen confirmed. "Why? Don't you think it'll deliver a sufficiently big bang?"

Foxleigh took a deep breath as he looked up at the sleek fighter stretched out in front of them, crouched on its landing skids like a mountain lion preparing to spring. "No, I think a functional Talus-6 interceptor will pack all the bang you could possibly want," he assured the blackcollar.

And with that, Foxleigh's moment of reverence vanished. Even an advanced fighter was, after all, only a tool. A simple means to an end. "What exactly are you planning to do with it?" he asked, running a hand over the coating of dust to expose a hand-lettered word written on the underside missile rack.

"What do you think I want with it?" Jensen countered, giving him an odd look.

"There's more than one possibility." Foxleigh pointed to the word he'd uncovered. "See this?"

Jensen craned his neck. " 'Gotterdammerung'?"

"It's the old Germanic version of 'doomsday,' " Foxleigh explained. "A composer named Richard Wagner wrote about fourteen hours of opera about it." He tapped the metal. "The point is that there are enough kilotons packed away in here to make sure the Ryqril never take anything out of the mountain except radioactive slag."

"I'm not destroying Aegis," Jensen said firmly. "It's resisted the Ryqril too long for us to just blow it up."

"Then what are you doing?" Foxleigh persisted. "You think a single fighter dodging Corsairs over North America is going to do anyone any good?"

"Depends on what you mean by any good," Jensen said. "What does any of this have to do with you, anyway?"