The decision was made: Trade was stocked top to bottom with lifelong bureaucrats. Even after they purged the anti-Nidu elements, there were enough competent people to work around Soram. Soram wasn't aware that last bit was part of the equation, of course, although the longer he was at Trade the more he suspected he didn't get listened to as much as he thought he should.

But again, he wasn't quite sure how to go about fixing that. The problem with being fundamentally useless is that it's difficult to shift gears into being useful. But even Soram was aware it was time to get useful, quick.

And so, when the confidential, encrypted message purporting to come from Ben Javna at State popped into Soram's mail queue and presented the trade secretary with a shot at redemption, he took it exactly as it was intended: as a gift, and at face value. Had Soram the complexity of mind a position such as his generally required, or even just the healthy paranoia of a career politician, he might have thought to trace the route of the mail, in which he (or more accurately his technical staff) would find that the message was cleverly, subtly but undeniably faked—deep in its routing history was information that showed it originated not from the State Department but from an anonymous remailer in Norway. It had been sent there by a second anonymous remailer in Qatar, which had received it from Archie McClellan, who created it after his communicator discussion with Phipps.

The message was brief:

Secretary Soram—

Secretary Heffer wished me to convey to you the following information regarding the Nidu situation.

—here followed a short explanation of who Robin Baker was and why she was important to the Nidu—

After consultation with the President and the Chief of staff it was decided that it would be best for you to approach the Nidu Ambassador with this information, so as to ameliorate recent difficulties. I have been informed to tell you that time is of the essence and it would be advisable to initiate contact with the Nidu Ambassador without delay after receiving this information.

Soram was yelling for his secretary to get on the horn to the Nidu embassy before he'd even gotten to that last part.

An hour later Soram found himself escorted into the inner sanctum of Narf-win-Getag, Nidu Ambassador to the UNE, enjoying Nidu sarf tea (generally regarded to taste something like cow urine to most humans, who nevertheless never refused when the Nidu insisted on providing every human visitor with a steaming cup of the stuff nearly as soon as they entered the embassy) and sharing sailing stories with the ambassador, whose own yacht, as it happened, was docked at the same marina as Soram's. Narf-win-Getag was of course delighted to hear about Miss Baker, and assured Soram that upon delivery of the girl for the coronation ceremony, trade negotiations would resume without further delay. Soram invited Narf-win-Getag for a weekend jaunt on his yacht. Narf-win-Getag offered Soram another cup of sarf tea.

On the way back to Trade, Soram had a thought about the press conference he planned to call the next morning, the one in which he declared that the Nidu were coming back to the trade table thanks to his intense lobbying. So he called Jim Heffer's office. Heffer wasn't back from his Asia trip—he was always somewhere else, wasn't he—so he talked to Ben Javna instead.

"Given your help in these discussions with the Nidu, I was wondering if you want anyone from State at the press conference tomorrow," Soram said.

"Mr. Secretary, I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about," Javna said.

"I'm holding a press conference to announce that the Nidu are coming back to the negotiating table," Soram said. "I just got back from talking with the Nidu ambassador. The note you sent me was key in getting them back. I thought you might want to have someone at the conference. I'm scheduling it for nine-fifteen; we'll get on all the noon shows from that. Come on, Ben! It'll be fun."

"Mr. Secretary," Javna said, in an oddly even tone of voice. "I haven't sent you any messages in the last week. I certainly haven't sent any messages to you regarding the Nidu, and if I had, I wouldn't have suggested you share them with the Nidu."

"Oh," Soram said.

"If I may ask, Mr. Secretary, what was in the message?"

"That you'd found the girl they were looking for," Soram said.

"And what did you tell the ambassador?" Javna asked.

"Well, I told him that we'd be happy to provide the girl to them. You've got her, right? Surely she's agreed to help us."

"Well, Mr. Secretary, no and no," Javna said. "As far as I know, we don't have the girl, and so clearly she can't have agreed to help us. You've just guaranteed something we might not be able to deliver to a nation that already has cause for grievance against us."

"Oh," Soram said again. He suddenly felt cold. "Oh, dear."

"Mr. Secretary, if I may make a suggestion," Ben Javna said.

"Yes, of course," Soram said.

"If I were you, I would put off that press conference. I would also send me that note you seem to think I have sent to you. I would also not talk to anyone else about your note, or your visit to the Nidu. Finally, Mr. Secretary, until and unless you hear from me, Secretary Heffer, or President Webster, I'd strongly suggest you not make any long-term plans involving your current office. With all due respect to your position, sir, you've just humped the bunk. If you're lucky, you'll only have to resign."

"What happens if I'm not lucky?" Soram asked.

"If you're not lucky, we'll all be using cigarettes for currency in me prison exercise yard," Javna said. "Of course, mat's assuming that after they conquer Earth, the Nidu let us live."

Javna got off the line with Soram and immediately made the call to Heffer and got Adam Zane, his scheduler, instead. Heffer was just starting his speech lauding the retiring head of the LA office and couldn't be dragged away for anything short of a full-out attack. Javna briefly considered whether Soram's stupidity and incompetence constituted a clear and present danger to the Earth, and then told Zane to have Heffer call him the instant he stopped speechifying.

As he disconnected, Javna's mail queue blinked; Soram's message had arrived. Javna popped it up and grimaced when he read the message. Whoever had put it together knew as much about the girl as he did, and that of course was very bad. Javna pulled up the routing information; he wasn't an expert on mailing protocols but he was reasonably sure the UNE State Department was not routing extremely sensitive mail through an anonymous remailer in Norway. Whoever dropped this into Soram's lap knew that he wasn't the sort of person who would perform due diligence on the provenance of the message before stampeding off to cover himself in glory and save his own ass. It was someone who knew Soram well, or at least well enough.

Javna had his suspicions, of course. Secretary Pope and his sock puppet Dave Phipps were almost certainly behind this; they had the means and motive to pace Creek step for step in his own investigations. Then there was Defense's perennially cozy relationship with Jean Schroeder and the American Institute for Colonization. Creek had dug up the connection between Schroeder and that damned fool Dirk Moeller; it was almost equally certain there was a direct connection between Schroeder and either Pope or Phipps, or both. Officially the AIC was in bad odor across the Webster administration, but unofficially people like Schroeder and groups like the AIC were like barnacles on the ship of state. You couldn't just scrape them off; they had to be blasted off with a fucking water cannon.

Regardless of whom, the question was why. Ideally, Creek would even now be convincing the Baker lady to help out, and State would find some way to have her play her role in the Nidu coronation ceremony so that she walked away from it with no undue trauma. In other words, whoever was playing Soram was only having him deliver a message State would hopefully have delivered a day later at most. If it was sabotage, it didn't make much sense.