"You think I sent this," said Bean.

"Or Petra did," said Alai. "I tried to tell myself that perhaps you hadn't impressed upon her the importance of keeping this information from the Hegemon. But then I realized that I was thinking like a very old-fashioned Muslim. She is responsible for her own actions. And she understood as well as you did that maintaining secrecy on this matter was vital."

Bean sighed.

"I didn't send it," said Bean. "Petra didn't send it. We not only understood your desire to keep this secret, we agreed with it. There is zero chance we would have sent information about what you're doing to anyone, period."

"And yet here is this message, sent from our own netbase. From this building!"

"Alai," said Bean, "we're three of the smartest people on Earth. We've been through a war together, and the two of you survived Achilles's kidnapping. And yet when something like this happens, you absolutely know that we're the ones who betrayed your trust."

"Who else from outside our circle knew this?"

"Well, let's see. All the men at that meeting have staffs. Their staffs are not made up of idiots. Even if no one explicitly told them, they'll see memos, they'll hear comments. Some of these men might even think it's not a breach of security to tell a deeply trusted aide. And a few of them might actually be only figureheads, so they have to tell the people who'll be doing the real work or nothing will get done."

"I know all these men," said Alai.

"Not as well as you know us," said Petra. "Just because they're good Muslims and loyal to you doesn't mean they're all equally careful."

"Peter has been building up a network of informants and correspondents since he was ... well, since he was a kid. Long before any of them knew he was just a kid. It would be shocking if he didn't have an informant in your palace."

Alai sat staring at the paper on the desk. "This is a very clumsy sort of disguise for the message," said Alai. "I suppose you would have done a better job of it."

"I would have encrypted it," said Bean, "and Petra probably would have put it inside a graphic."

"I think the very clumsiness of the message should tell you something," said Petra. "The person who wrote this is someone who thinks he only needs to hide this information from somebody outside the inner circle. He would have to know that if you saw it, you'd recognize instantly that 'Shaw' refers to the old rulers of Iran, and 'Pack' refers to Pakistan, while 'Kemal' is a transparent reference to the founder of post-Ottoman Turkey. How could you not get it?"

Alai nodded. "So he's only coding it like this to keep outsiders from understanding it, in case it gets intercepted by an enemy."

"He doesn't think anybody here would search his outgoing messages," said Petra. "Whereas Bean and I know for a fact that we've been bugged since we got here."

"Not terribly successfully," said Alai with a tight little smile.

"Well, you need better snoopware, to start with," said Bean.

"And if we had sent a message to Peter," said Petra, "we would have told him explicitly to warn our Indian friend not to block the Chinese exit from India, only their return."

"We would have had no other reason to tell Peter about this at all," said Bean. "We don't work for him. We don't really like him all that much."

"He's not," said Petra firmly, "one of us."

Alai nodded, sighed, leaned back in his chair. "Please, sit down," he said.

"Thank you," said Petra.

Bean walked to the window and looked out over lawns sprinkled by purified water from the Mediterranean. Where the favor of Allah was, the desert blossomed. "I don't think there'll be any harm from this," said Bean. "Aside from our losing a bit of sleep tonight."

"You must see that it's hard for me to suspect my closest colleagues here."

"You're the Caliph," said Petra, "but you're also still a very young man, and they see that. They know your plan is brilliant, they love you, they follow you in all the great things you plan for your people. But when you tell them, Keep this an absolute secret, they say yes, they even mean it, but they don't take it really quite seriously because, you see, you re..."

"Still a boy," said Alai.

"That will fade with time," said Petra. "You have many years ahead of you. Eventually all these older men will be replaced."

"By younger men that I trust even less," said Alai ruefully.

"Telling Peter is not the same thing as telling an enemy," said Bean. "He shouldn't have had this information in advance of the invasion. But you notice that the informer didn't tell him when the invasion would start."

"Yes he did," said Alai.

"Then I don't see it," said Bean.

Petra got up again and looked at the printed-out email. "The message doesn't say anything about the date of the invasion."

"It was sent," said Alai, "on the day of the invasion."

Bean and Petra looked at each other. "Today?" said Bean.

"The Turkic campaign has already begun," said Alai. "As soon as it was dark in Xinjiang. By now we have received confirmation via email messages that three airfields and a significant part of the power grid are in our hands. And so far, at least, there is no sign that the Chinese know anything is happening. It's going better than we could have hoped."

"It's begun," said Bean. "So it was already too late to change the plans for the third front."

"No, it wasn't," said Alai. "Our new orders have been sent. The Indonesian and Arab commanders are very proud to be entrusted with the mission that will take the war home to the enemy."

Bean was appalled. "But the logistics of it... there's no time to plan."

"Bean," said Alai with amusement. "We already had the plans for a complicated beach landing. That was a logistical nightmare. Putting three hundred separate forces ashore at different points on the Chinese coast, under cover of darkness, three days from today, and supporting them with air raids and air drops-my people can do that in their sleep. That was the best thing about your idea, Bean, my friend. It wasn't a plan at all, it was a situation, and the whole plan is for every individual commander to improvise ways to fulfil the mission objectives. I told them, in my orders, that as long as they keep moving inland, protect their men, and cause maximum annoyance to the Chinese government and military, they can't fail."

"It's begun," said Petra.

"Yes," said Bean. "It's begun, and Achilles is not in China."

Petra looked at Bean and grinned. "Let's see what we can do about keeping him away."

"More to the point," said Bean. "Since we have not given Peter the specific message he needs to convey to Virlomi in India, may we do so now, with your permission?"

Alai squinted at him. "Tomorrow. After news of the fighting in Xinjiang has started to come out. I will tell you when."

In Uphanad's office, Graff sat with his feet on the desk as Uphanad worked at the security console.

"Well, sir, that's it," said Uphanad. "They're off."

"And they'll arrive when?" said Graff.

"I don't know," said Uphanad. "That's all about trajectories and very complicated equations balancing velocity, mass, speed-I wasn't the astrophysics teacher in Battle School, you recall."

"You were small-force tactics, if I remember," said Graff. "And when you tried that experiment with military music- having the boys learn to sing together-"

Graff groaned. "Please. Don't remind me. What a deeply stupid idea that was."

"But you saw that at once and let us mercifully drop the whole thing."

"Esprit de corps my ass,' said Graff.

Uphanad hit a group of keys on the console keyboard and the screen showed that he had just logged off. "All done here. I'm glad you found out about the informer here in MinCol. Having the Wiggins leave was the only safe option."