Speaking of whom, the Ambassador — easily identifiable by the two bodyguards — was sitting at a table at the pavement restaurant. Rachel walked round to the kitchen side then marched up to the nearest bodyguard — who was focusing on the square, not on the waiters approaching from the restaurant entrance — and tapped him on the shoulder. “Rachel Mansour, to see the Honorable Elspeth Morrow.”

The bodyguard jumped. “Whoa!”

Morrow looked up, her face colorless and her expression bored. “You’re late. George Cho said I should talk to you. Strongly implied that I needed to talk to you. Who are you?”

Rachel pulled out a chair and sat down. “I work for the same people as George. Different department, though. Officially, I’m on protocol. Unofficially, I’ll deny everything.” She smiled faintly.

Morrow waved at the chair with poor grace. “Okay, spook. So, what does George want?”

Rachel leaned back, then glanced at the bodyguard. “You know about the, ah, problem that concerns us.” She studied Morrow intently, seeing a slim woman, evidently in her early forties. Moscow hadn’t been good at antiaging therapy, but she could easily have been twenty years older. She wore her chestnut hair shoulder-length, and her green eyes seemed haunted by … just haunted. There had to be hundreds of millions of ghosts already riding at her shoulder, and the knowledge that she could add to their ranks — What must that do to her? Rachel wondered. “Forgive me for asking, but did you know Maureen Davis, Simonette Black, or Maurice Pendelton well?” she asked.

Morrow nodded. “Maurice was an old friend,” she said slowly. “I didn’t know Black other than by repute. Maureen … we knew each other. But Maurice is the one I feel for.” She leaned forward. “What do you know about this?” she asked quietly. “Why did George bring you? You’re black ops, aren’t you?”

Rachel raised a hand to summon a waiter. “I’m, um, working with George’s team from the other side,” she said quietly. “George works for a diplomatic solution. Me, it’s my job to … well, George very urgently wants to ensure that if someone tries to kill you — which we think is a high probability in the next week or so — firstly, we want them to fail, and secondly, they should fail in such a way that we can find out who they are and why they’re doing it, and roll up not only the point assassin but their entire network.”

“You do assassinations yourself?” Elspeth stared at her as if she’d sprouted a second head. “I didn’t know Earth did—”

“No!” Rachel gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “Quite the opposite.” The waiter arrived. “I’ll have the mango croquette and roast shoulder of pork, thanks. And a glass of, um, the traditional red bonnet viper tisane?” She spoke without looking up, but from the corner of her vision noticed the bodyguard shadowing the waiter with aggressive vigilance. She nodded at Morrow. “The UN, as you can imagine, would very much like to resolve the current impasse between the government of Moscow in Exile and New Dresden. If for no other reason than to avoid the horrible precedent it would create if your vengeance fleet completes its mission. We especially don’t want to see a situation where a party or parties unknown butcher so many of the remaining Muscovite government-in-exile’s senior ranks that the situation becomes irrevocable. We want to know who is trying to engineer this situation, and why.”

Morrow nodded. “Well, so do I,” she said calmly. “That’s why I have bodyguards.”

Rachel managed a faint smile. “With all due respect, I’m sure your bodyguard is perfectly adequate for dealing with run-of-the-mill problems. However, in all three cases to date the assassin succeeded in passing through a secured zone and making an unobstructed getaway. This tells us that we’re not dealing with an ordinary lunatic — we’re dealing with a formidable professional, or even a team. Ordinary guards don’t cut it. If I was the killer, you would be dead by now. My briefcase could be loaded with a bomb, your bodyguard could be shot with his own weapon … do you see?”

Elspeth nodded reluctantly.

“I’m here to keep you alive,” Rachel said quietly. “There’s a — well, I can’t go into our sources. But we think there’s probably going to be an attempt on your life between six and ten days from now.”

“Oh.” Morrow shook her head. Oddly, she seemed to relax a trifle, as if the immediacy of the warning, the concreteness of the high jeopardy, gave her something to cling to. “What do you think you can do if this master assassin wants to kill me?”

The waiter arrived with Rachel’s order on a tray. “Oh, I can think of half a dozen possibilities,” Rachel said. She smiled tiredly. Then she peered at Elspeth’s face closely until the ambassador blinked. “We’ll have to run it past the ship’s surgeon, but I think Plan A can be made to work.”

“What? What have you got in mind?”

“Plan A is the shell game.” Rachel put her glass down. “We’re assuming that our unidentified but highly competent assassins are also well informed. If this is the case, they’ll probably learn or guess that you’ve been warned before they set up the hit. So what George would like to do is play a shell game with them. Step zero is to send Dr. Baxter off-planet — somewhere where we’re fairly certain there are no assassins. We’d like you to ensure that you’ve got as few public appearances and important meetings as possible during the window of opportunity.

“And then … well, I’m about your height, and the body mass difference can be finessed with padding and loose clothing. The real trick will be getting the face and hair and posture right. We’re going to ensure that for your remaining public appearances you have a body double. Bait, in other words. You will be hiding in a locked room in a nuclear bunker with a closed-cycle air supply and half an assault division sitting on top of it — or as a guest on board a UN diplomatic yacht, sovereign territory of Earth, with a couple of cruisers from the New Dresden navy keeping an eye on it, if you prefer. It’s up to you: they want to keep you alive, too, as long as those missiles are heading in this direction. But I’m going to hang my tail out where someone can try to grab it — not with a long gun, but up close and personal, so we can snatch them.”

Elspeth looked at her with something like awe — or whatever the appropriate expression was for dealing with suicidal idiots. “How much do they pay you to do this job?” she asked. “I’ve heard some foolhardy things in my time, but that’s about the craziest—” She shook her head.

“I don’t do this for money,” Rachel murmured. Responsibility. Get it wrong, and nearly a billion people die. She glanced at the square. “I was here about ten years ago. Did you ever take the time to go round the museums?”

“Oh, I’ve been round the Imperial Peace Museum and the People’s Palace of the Judiciary,” Elspeth replied. “Captured it all.” She tapped a broad signet ring and a sapphire spot blinked on it. “These people have the most remarkable history — more history than a world ought to have, if you ask me.” She fixed Rachel with a contemplative stare. “Did you know they’ve had more world wars than Old Earth?”

“I was vaguely aware of that,” Rachel said drily, having crammed three thousand pages of local history on her first journey here, many years earlier. “How are the museums these days?”

“Big. Oh, this month there’s a most extensive display of regional burial costumes, some sort of once-in-a-decade exhibition that’s on now.” Slowing even more, Elspeth continued thoughtfully: “There was a whole gallery explaining the sequence of conquests that enabled the Eastern Empire to defeat their enemies in the south and get a stranglehold on the remaining independent cornucopia-owning fabwerks. Fascinating stuff.”

“Nothing on the mass graves, I take it,” Rachel observed.