She was absolutely right, Jules knew, but he had to play out his hand. “I can make life
damned unpleasant for you if you don’t talk.”
“Your puny tortures mean nothing to me. I presume you know that some wills are too
strong to be broken by mere physical pain. Mine is one of them. In the end you would
merely kill me, and that would avail you nothing.”
“It would sure put a crimp in your plans, though, wouldn’t it?”
“My personal ones, yes. But as for saving your precious Empire, my death won’t matter
in the slightest. The plans are already set, and they will go forward now whether I’m alive
or not.”
It was painful for Jules to admit that a woman whom he held at gunpoint had him over a
barrel, but the situation was close to the truth. Calmly, refusing to be angered by her
needling tone, he considered his alternatives.
He might try torturing her to get the information he needed, despite her boasts that she
wouldn’t crack. He couldn’t torture her in the house, though, because her screams of pain
would bring everyone running-and if he gagged her to stop the screaming, she wouldn’t
be able to talk. Even if he assumed that he and Vonnie could somehow get her away
from the house, they could not guarantee the woman would tell them the truth, even
under torture. Lady A, he was sure, was quite capable of constructing smooth lies to
mislead them and stall until her plans were already in operation and it was too late to do
anything. Even if, by some miracle, they could get Lady A completely out of the house,
into her spaceship and off to some other world, the closest planet to Gastonia with a fully
equipped Service base was more than a day’s flight away at top speed. There would be
facilities there for questioning her more thoroughly-but invaluable time would have been
lost.
Vonnie could read her husband well enough by now to know the processes going on in
his mind. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the vial of nitrobarb and held it up for
Jules to see. “Perhaps this would help,” she said, speaking for the first time. “She’d
obviously been planning to use it on you.”
The existence of the nitrobarb changed things considerably. It was the strongest truth
serum ever invented; no one under its influence could lie or withhold information. The
drawback, though, was its side effect-the drug proved fatal fifty percent of the time.
Lady A was a veritable mine of information; it would be a shame to waste much of it if
she should die after only one session. He knew, too, that he and Vonnie were not
equipped to give Lady A the most thorough cross-examination; the experts at
Headquarters, with all their computer references to back them up could make each
answer solve a dozen separate questions. Using nitrobarb on Lady A here would be
squandering a potentially valuable resource.
Still, he had little choice. They had to learn more about Operation Annihilate, and it had to
be in a hurry. Wasteful or not, there was no other way to learn the truth before it was too
late.
Jules looked at the vial of clear fluid and nodded. “We’ll give it to her,” he said grimly.
He could feel Lady A stiffen as he led her to a chair and forced her to sit down. “No
wonder your side will lose the struggle,” she said haughtily. “You make too many
mistakes. The pawns make their own decisions, and even when they capture the
opposing queen they don’t know how to use her.”
Vonnie had gone back to the desk drawer and found a hyposprayer to administer the
nitrobarb. “And what would you do in our position?” she asked sweetly as she returned
to the prisoner.
Lady A laughed coldly. “It’s not my business to give you advice.”
“Then don’t criticize, either,” Jules said as his wife administered the injection.
Lady A said not another word. She simply smiled at Jules, a cold and evil smile that
vanished from her face only when she fell into the stupor that was the first stage of
nitrobarb’s effect.
It would be another twenty minutes before Lady A passed into the second stage and
was ready for questioning. Jules and Yvonne spent the intervening time by continuing the
search they’d begun before Lady A had interrupted them. Jules asked the computer files
about C, but received no information at all. either the computer had no information about
the conspiracy’s mysterious leader or else it was filed under a special codeword that he
would never guess.
He asked next for information on Karla Jost and received a complete readout on her life
story-including the fact that she had left the planet under the auspices of Project
Resurrection. Checking this cross-reference provided him with a wealth of
information-most particularly the names of the people who’d been removed, the dates of
removal, and the planets to which they’d been taken. He asked for, and received, a
printout of the list, and tucked the paper into a pocket.
Vonnie, meanwhile, had found nothing new in her search of the desk, and by this time
Lady A was starting to come around again. The two agents crowded up close to her so
as not to miss a word she said.
“Who is CT’ was Jules’s first question.
“I don’t know his real identity,” Lady A said slowly. “Is he the leader of your conspiracy?”
“Yes.”
“Where is he based?” “I don’t know.”
Jules was gnashing his teeth in frustration. This was the hard part of questioning a
person under nitrobarb; the subject had to tell the truth, but he told no more than the
precise answer to the question asked. Knowing the proper question was an art in
itself-one that his sister Yvette had been better trained in that he had. “Tell me exactly
how you communicate with him, then.”
“He has a series of telecom numbers in various sectors that relay through a subcom link
directly to him, wherever he is. You call him through those numbers; if he chooses to
respond, his answer is printed out on your telecom screen.”
A clever way of operating anonymously-and almost impossible to trace, Jules thought.
Still, if SOTE could learn the particular subcom frequency C used, they might be able to
tap in and monitor some of the calls. “Tell me the telecom numbers,” he said.
Lady A rattled off a string of numbers, and Jules copied them down on the back of the
Project Resurrection printout. When she’d given him all that she could, the woman
stopped abruptly, and it was up to Jules to think of a new question.
“What does C look like?” he asked.
“Tall and thin with thick black hair and gray eyes. High cheekbones, sharp chin, crow’s
feet about the eyes. He dresses well, but is not very muscular or athletic.”
That description narrowed the search down a bit, but it was still far too general. “How old
do you think he is?”
“Middle fifties, I’d say.”
“Do you have any other superiors?”
“No, he’s the only person above me in the organization.” Jules next started a series of
questions about Lady A herself. Her name, she said, was really Gretchen Baumann and
she came from the planet Kiesel. She was forty-three years old, and had been a
member of this conspiracy for the past eighteen years, slowly working her way up the
organizational ladder until she reached this exalted position. Her chief asset had been
that she’d had no criminal record of any sort, no way for the Service to trace her
activities.
The purpose of the conspiracy was quite simple: to destroy the Stanley dynasty and to
place C on the Throne as the new Emperor. It was not yet decided whether Lady A
would marry him to become Empress, or whether she would take a secondary post as
Chancellor. The conspiracy had a navy and armed forces of its own, well-trained and
waiting for their cue to move in and take over.
“How do you know what’s going on in SOTET’ Jules asked. “We’ve had hypnotic
instructions implanted in the minds of most top-level secretaries within the Service,” Lady
A said. “Every few days-or whenever they learn anything of vital importance-they phone
a special number and relate everything they’ve learned since their last phone call. Then
they completely forget they’ve made the call, and go on about their business as normal.”
That was a chilling thought. No wonder it had been so hard to trace down the leaks-all
the people who betrayed the Service honestly thought they were being loyal and, short of
administering-tough mind probes, they would test out truthfully when asked whether they
were traitors. Jules wanted to ask for more specifics, such as key names of those under
such hypnotic compulsion, but time was pressing and there was still another crucial topic