“Good job,” he said. “Good job, all of you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Dekker breathed, and looked past him where—he turned his head—the vids showed riot in Bonn and Paris, just wide-tracking, lost.
“Ens. Dekker,” the reporters shouted, “Ens. Dekker, how do you feel right now?”
Dekker turned his head to look at the reporter, honestly trying and failing, Graff read it, to accept one more slow-moving attention track. “I—“ he began.
A reporter said, “Ens. Dekker. Ens. Dekker. There’s a news crew standing by with a link to Bonn. Your mother’s with the crew. Are you willing to speak to her, tell her how you feel at this moment?”
Damn! Graff thought, and shot another glance at the vids, where placards and banners called for peace, where a blond woman with a look as lost as Dekker’s gazed into the lenses and then to the side, probably toward a monitor.
“Talk to her,” the reporter said, “you can talk, she’ll hear you—do you hear us, Ms. Dekker?”
“Yes,” Ingrid Dekker said. “Yes, I hear you….”
“I hear you,” Dekker said faintly, and the whole area shushed each other to quiet.
“Paul? Paul? Is that you?”
“Yes.” God, he was going to fracture—Graff saw the tears well up, saw the tremor. “Are you all right, mother? Are they treating you all right?”
Ingrid Dekker bit back tears. “/ wanted to return your
call.”
“I wanted to call again. They said the lawyers wouldn’t—“
Somebody shoved between Ingrid Dekker and the interviewer, said, “That’s enough.”
“Let her alone!” Dekker cried. “Damn you, take your hands off her—“
The picture jolted, the broad shadow of peacer security for a moment, Ingrid Dekker’s voice crying, “Paul, —Paul, 1 want to go home!”
Kady got hold of Dekker. Aboujib did; and Pollard said, on Optex, “Those sons of bitches.”
“We’ll see if we can get Ms. Dekker back on,” the interviewer was saying; and addressed his counterpart in Bonn. “Can you get to Ms. Dekker to ask—?”
Dekker was in shock, reporters shoving Optex pickups toward him, marines under strict orders not to shove back. That face was magnified on monitors all around the area, pale and lost, then Senator Caldwell’s face was on the screens, reporters asking him his reaction.
Caldwell said, gravely: ‘ ‘It’s clear Ms. Dekker had something more to say, and the Federation leadership didn’t ‘want her to say it. I see enough to raise serious questions about how free Ms. Dekker is, at the moment…”
Serious questions, Graff thought, choking on his own outrage. Serious questions whether Porey’s timing for noon in Bonn, when Mazian was there, with the peace demonstrators, was anything like coincidence.
God, run the test right past Luna in a move the peacers were bound to protest, have the reporters set up, the questions primed—
Then send Dekker and a crowd of excited crews head-on into the media for a reaction, when Porey damned well knew he was spaced?
He couldn’t pull Dekker out directly, couldn’t order Security to oust the reporters, daren’t look like censorship on this side of the issue. He went in, took Dekker’s arm with Optexes on high gain all around him. “Someone will do something.” Which rang in his own ears as one more damned promise he didn’t know how he was going to keep.
Dekker gave him a bleak, blank stare. “I don’t want to leave, sir. If they can get her back I want to talk to her.”
The mikes got that, too. Kady said, out of turn, “They don’t want her loose. That’s clear.”
But all that showed on the Bonn monitors was a shut wooden door, and a reporter outside it, with no sound going out, talking, while demonstrators elbowed and shoved.
And all that showed on theirs was Dekker’s stricken face, Dekker saying, dazedly, “They lied to her. They lied to her all the way…”
“It’s playing,” Demas said, leaning against the counter, “it’s playing over and over again, around the planet, as the world wakes up. Dekker’s a handsome kid, doesn’t at all hurt his case. Or ours.”
Graff wanted to break something—Demas’ and Saito’s necks, if he didn’t recognize in Demas’ glum expression an equal disgust. He looked at the vid, seeing Ingrid Dekker’s bewildered distress, her son’s—“Let her alone!” Over and over again.