Conspirator #3 : "But your father-"

Conspirator #1 : "He'll fall in with me of necessity." (Metallic noise.) "He may be weak, but he's not stupid. Once the tinkers realize the dice are cast, they will declare blood feud against the Crown. He'll have to do it. I stress, this is not a coup against the Crown, it is a coup for the Crown, to defend it from the enemies within."

Conspirator #3 : "And none shall call it by any other name."

Conspirator #2 : "And if the blast should fail to live up to expectations?"

Conspirator #1 : "Then I shall lead the guards in an heroic attempt to rescue the palace from the rebels who appear to have seized it. Long live the king!"

Conspirator #4 : "I should give the alchemists their final reward then, sir."

Conspirator #1 : "Make it so, and may Sky Father have mercy on them in the afterlife, for their services to the Crown."

Translated Transcript Ends

Recovery from fentanyl poisoning was relatively rapid: the pain came later. They kept asking questions, even when he was on a drip and hallucinating. "What happened? What did he say?" All Mike could do was shake his head and mutter incoherently. Later, he made a full statement. And another. A whole goddamn committee camped by his hospital bed for an afternoon, trying to come up with an agreed timeline for the fuckup. Mike was expecting to be suspended pending investigation, but from the noises they were making it sounded like they wanted to sweep everything under the rug, pretend Matt had never existed. Maybe that was how the DOD dealt with unwelcome problems: or maybe they just didn't want to admit that they'd destabilized a willing defector. Later another committee came by to grill him about Matt's nuclear threat, but when he asked what action they were taking on it they told him he had no need to know-from which he deduced that they were taking it very seriously indeed.

It didn't matter to Mike. He was out of the loop, officially injured in the line of duty. He lay in bed for two days, numb with apathy and guilt, mind constantly circling back to worry at the same unwelcome realization. I fucked up. On the second day a card arrived from Nikki, an invitation to Pete's funeral. And then, just as he was graduating from depression to self-loathing, Smith dropped in.

"How are you feeling?"

"Better." Which was a lie. "Not sleeping too good."

"Yeah, well." Smith mustered a sympathetic expression that looked horribly artificial to Mike. "We need you back on duty."

"Huh?"

The colonel dragged the nearest chair over and sat down next to Mike's bed. Mike peered at him, noticing the bags under his eyes for the first time, the two-day stubble. "I'd like to be able to give you a month off, refer you for counseling, and let you recover at your own pace. Unfortunately, I can't. You were due into in-processing today and you're on the critical path for CLEANSWEEP. And your immediate backup was Pete."

"Oh." Mike was silent for a moment. "I was expecting an enquiry, you know?"

"There's been a board of enquiry." Smith leaned forward. "We don't have time to piss around, Mike. We had a video take on you when Source Greensleeves offed Pete and took you hostage, it turned up yesterday. Left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing, excessive compartmentalization in our

security architecture, et cetera. Nobody's blaming you for what happened; if anyone gets blamed it's going to be me for sending you guys in in the first place. But. We're moving too fast to play the blame game right now-"

Mike gestured at the table on the other side of the bed: "Pete's funeral is tomorrow. I was planning on being there."

Smith looked worried. "Shit, our schedule puts you on a ranch in Maryland-wait, hang on, it's not like that. I'll get you to the funeral, even if I have to bend a few rules. But I really do need you back on duty."

Mike stared at him. "Spill it."

Smith stared right back. "Spill what?"

"It." Mike crossed his arms. "This setup stinks. Whatever happened to your professional assets? I thought you guys majored in infiltrating hostile territory. You're the military, you go to exotic places and meet interesting people and kill them. I'm just a cop. Why do you need me so badly?"

"Hold onto that thought." Smith paused for a moment. "Look, I think you habitually overestimate what we can do. We're very good at blowing shit up, that's true. And NSA can tap every phone call on the planet, break almost any code," he added, with a trace of pride. "But… we're not good at human intelligence anymore. Not since the end of the Cold War, when most of the old HUMINT programs were shut down. You don't get promoted in Langley by learning Pashtun and going to freeze your butt off in a cave in central Asia for six years, among people who'll torture you to death in an eyeblink if they figure out who you are. The best and the brightest go into administration or electronic intelligence; the people who volunteer for spying missions and get through the training are often, bluntly speaking, nutjobs. A couple of years ago we had to fire the CIA station chief in Bonn, did you know that? One of our top guys in Germany. He'd been invoicing for a ring of informers but it turned out he was a member of an evangelical church, and what he was really doing was bankrolling a church mission. Anyway, you've got a three-month lead on anyone we could train up to do the job, and whatever your own opinion of your abilities, you are not bad. You've done police undercover work and stakeouts and run informers-that's about ninety percent of the skill set of a field agent. So rather than pulling one of our few competent field agents out of whatever very important job they're already doing, and trying to teach them hochsprache, we figured we'd take you and give you the additional ten percent of the skill set that you'll need."

A long pause. "Bullshit. What else?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know damn well I'm unreliable. I'm not acculturated, I still think like a cop, even if you're right and the job overlap is significant. I'm unreliable from a departmental point of view: I've got the wrong instincts. And this isn't a Hollywood movie where delicate operations get handed to maverick outsiders. So. What aren't you telling me?"

Smith shrugged. "I told them you'd see through it," he said, glancing at the door. Then he reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a photograph. "When did you last see this woman?"

"Who-oh. Her. What's she got to do with this?" Mike's mouth went dry.

Smith glared at him, clearly irritated. "Now you're the one who's playing games. You've been through the clearance process, we know what color underpants you wear, we interviewed your ex-wife, we grabbed your home phone records." He waved the photograph. "Confession is good for the soul, Mike. Level with me and I'll level with you. How well do you know this woman?"

Shit. Should have guessed they'd figure it out. "There's not much to tell." Mike struggled to drag his scattered thoughts back together. "I met her a few years ago. She's a journalist, she was doing a story about drug testing for the glossy she worked for. It worked out really well at first. Did a couple of dates, began to get serious." How much do they want to know? It was still a sore point for him. "Yes, we did sleep together."

"Mike. Mike." Smith shook his head. "That's not what this is about, not really, we're not the East German Stasi."

"Well, what did you want to know?" Mike glared at him. "She's a journalist, Colonel. She wasn't faking it. I picked her up at the office a couple of times. I didn't have a fucking clue she was anything else! Let me remind you that I didn't know the Clan existed, back then. None of us did. I don't think she did, either."