The woman leaned out the window and spoke to the other members of the team. “Report to the safe house,” she said. Gray uniform tunic, Captain’s rank-tabs, red General Staff flashes, Military Intelligence insignia.
The motion left the light on her face for a second. She was in her late twenties, not much older than he; a dark brunette, black hair cropped to a plush sable cap, black eyes, high cheekbones, and a rather full mouth. An Imperial face or Sierran, except for the hardness to it, the body beneath close-coupled and muscular but full-bosomed. He blinked, surprise tugging at his mind.
“Gerta!” he blurted.
probability subject identity not gerta hosten is too low to be meaningfully calculated, Center noted, overlaying the woman’s face with a series of regressions that took it back to the teenager who’d said good-bye to him on the docks of Oathtaking twelve years ago.
She sat back and let the pistol rest on her knee; it was a massive, chunky, squared-off thing, not a revolver.
recoil-operated automatic, magazine in the grip, Center said. 11mm caliber, six to eight rounds.
“Hi, Johnnie,” she said in Landisch. “Nice to see you again.”
John took a deep breath. “If you wanted to talk, you could have invited me more politely,” he said in a neutral tone.
“Behfel ist behfel, Johnnie.”
“I’m not under Chosen orders.”
She smiled and waggled the automatic.
“All right, I grant that. I presume you’re not going to kill me?”
“I’d really regret having to do that, John,” she said.
veracity 95% ±3, Center observed. A brief flash showed pupil dilation and heat patterns on Gerta’s face.
Of course, the way she phrased it implied that she might have to kill him anyway. Looking at her, he didn’t have the least doubt she’d do it—regrets or no.
“How’re the children?” he asked after a moment.
“Erika’s just starting school, and Johan’s at the stage where his favorite word is no,” she said. “We’ve adopted two more, as well. Protégé kids, a boy and a girl. The boy’s a byblow, probably one of Heinrich’s.”
“Two?” John said, raising his eyebrows.
“Policy.”
Which was information, of a sort. The Chosen Council must be anticipating casualties . . . and not just in the upcoming war with the Empire, either.
He didn’t try to look out the windows as the wheels hammered over the cobblestones, then hummed on smoother main street pavement of asphalt or stone blocks. Gerta uncorked a silver flask. John took it and sipped: banana brandy, something he hadn’t tasted in a long time.
“Danke,” he said. “Anything you can tell me?”
“The colonel will brief you, Johnnie. Just . . . be reasonable, eh?”
“Reasonable depends on where you’re sitting,” he said, returning the flask.
“No it doesn’t. When someone else holds all the cards, reasonable is whatever they say it is.”
He looked at the pistol. She shook her head.
“Not just this. The Chosen hold all the cards on Visager; it’d be smart to keep that in mind.”
He was almost relieved when they pulled into a side entrance to the Chosen embassy compound. The Wilkens was as inconspicuous as a steamcar in Ciano could be—powered vehicles weren’t all that common here, even now—and the rear windows were tinted. The embassy itself was fairly large, a severe block of dark granite from the outside, the only ornamentation a gilded-bronze sunburst above the ironwork gates. The area within was larger than the Santander legation, mainly because all the Land’s diplomatic personnel lived on the delegation’s own extraterritorial ground. It might have been something out of Copernik or Oathtaking inside, boxlike buildings with tall windows and smooth columns, low-relief caryatids beside the doors. Fires were burning in iron drums in the open spaces between, while clerks dumped in more documents and stirred the ashes with pokers and broomsticks.
Christ, he thought. The sight hit him in the belly like a fist, more than the danger to himself had. War was close if the embassy was torching their classified papers.
He was hustled through a doorway, down corridors, finally into a windowless room with a single overhead light. It shone into his eyes as he sat in the steel-frame chair beneath it, obscuring the two figures at a table in front of him. One of them spoke in Landisch: