‘They’ll all die,’ Jules said grimly. ‘Especially the Baron. The penalty for treason, remember, is summary execution. Those who survive the drug may live a few days longer than the others. That’s all. But you don’t really see yet. Keep on looking.’
Borton gazed back into the hall. As his eyes swept over the slack jaws and glazed expressions of the drugged men, they eventually came to rest on the tall, burly figure of a blond man with a pencil-thin mustache. There they stopped, and Borton’s face turned gray. The shock and surprise hit him so hard that he couldn’t even think to swear.
‘That’s Alf Rixton,’ he managed finally. ‘My first assistant. He’s been with me for over ten years! Top clearance, too, with lie detector and hypno-interrogation every year. He’s done splendid work.’
‘Yeah for the other side,’ Yvette said coldly. ‘The only crooks and traitors he ever caught were the ones his people wanted to get rid of. It’s all yours now, Borton, the whole operation. Take over. We’ll have to stay on-planet for a while some people higher up might get a tad suspicious if the Velasquezes left Algonia the instant this ring was broken – but we don’t want to appear in this
. Not so much as a whisper. Nobody here in the castle got a look at us – we moved a little too fast for them – and your men haven’t seen us. Only you know, and you won’t tell. But there are a few others you’ll have to silence for a time, if not permanently.’ She told him about the ambushers who were now trussed up on the Velasquezes’ hideaway estate.
Borton nodded. ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be taken care of. But listen, how can I explain all of this? There’ll be reports to fill out and the press will be asking all sorts of questions. They get very sharp whenever the nobility’s involved in scandal. What can I say? They won’t believe I planned this whole operation by myself.’
‘Of course not,’ Jules grinned. ‘Gospodin Rixton over there cooked the whole thing up and helped you pull it off. A fury with a short fuse as he waded into the thick of the fighting. Too bad the honors are posthumous, but he died upholding the glorious traditions of the Service.
Again, Borton nodded – more slowly, this time. ‘Thanks. One o f our very best men, he died a hero’s death, defending gallantly and so forth – sob, sob – the rat. Yeah, that’ll do it. But having me take the credit for this operation when the two of you really did all the work…’
‘It really wouldn’t be wise to let people know we’d been here,’ Yvette said quietly.
‘Khorosho,’
Borton grinned wryly. ‘Undercover agents should remain under cover.’
‘Exactly,’ Jules agreed. Then he looked at his sister and, in unison, they recited the Service salute: ‘Here’s to tomorrow, fellow and friend. May we all live to see it!’ And with that, they strode out of the room, out of the castle without being seen by Borton’s men- and out of Borton’s life forever. One scum pit had been cleaned out – it was time for them to move onward and upward to the next.
Borton stood motionless, staring at the door as it closed behind them. He knew what those two were – Agents Wombat and Periwinkle – but that was all he knew, or ever would know, about them. But they had given him too much to do to waste his time wool-gathering. He had to interrogate these prisoners, find out more about their organization so that he could sweep up the pawns as well as the kings, and concoct a story that would satisfy the press.
He let the rest of his men into the house and barked his orders. Then, shrugging his shoulders, he began questioning those of the hoodlums who were still alive.
News of the arrests broke early the next morning. Involving as it did the treason of a rich and important baron, all the news services leapt at it. Words flashed through the subether at many times the speed of light, and soon the information was being broadcast as a major scandal on every fully settled planet of the Empire.
In particular, the news reached a tall, angular man to whom it was more than just a piece of sensationalism. He lost no time in taking his private elevator tube to the subbasement, where his private map of the Empire glowed. He stood there looking up at its enormous bulk, his dark eyes scanning the pinpoints of light that represented planets. At first he could not find the green dot that represented
Algonia, one of his key systems – then he understood. His computers had already assimilated the data coming in from all parts of his domain, and had reassessed the situation. The dot that was Algonia no longer burned the green of one of his key planets, nor even the red that indicated he controlled it. That dot was a clear, steady blue-the blue that represented the Empire.
A setback, the man thought as he stroked his goatee. A definite setback. But hardly a crucial one. He felt comforted as he looked upward at his three-dimensional map. There were still more than two dozen green lights, still close to a thousand red ones. His crimson tide was still growing in magnitude, still threatening to engulf the few remaining spots of blue. The loss of one green light could hardly stop his inexorable progress.
The question remained, though, burning in the back of his brain: was the loss of Algonia a coincidence, or did it form a part of some counteroffensive against him? It would be hard to tell from this isolated incident; he would have to set his computers to looking for a pattern.
For some unexplained reason, the late Colonel Crandon crossed his mind. The traitor had said something about a special team of two agents. Could they in some way have been responsible for this affair? It was something to correlate, surely.
But he was not worried. Even if, somehow, two agents acting on their own could wipe out an entire planetary organization, they still could not begin to touch the entire structure of what he had built. Besides, he gloated, there are plenty of booby -traps along the way.
CHAPTER TEN – THE SWITCH
One of the most controversial provisions of the Stanley Doctrine was the one regarding marriages. Nobles were free to marry anyone they chose, whether the chosen was noble or common. Royalty did not have this freedom. (In fact, this is the only limitation placed on royalty in the entire document.) Members of the royal family were required to marry commoners. Moreover, the Stanley family name was to be retained even when a princess married; in that one case alone, the male changed his surname. This provision was considered shocking when it was announced, but the reasoning behind it was sound. Empress Stanley Three wanted to avoid the inbreeding that had absolutely destroyed the European monarchies by the twentieth century C.E. By absolutely forbidding marriage within a consanguinity of one thirty-second, she insured the continuing strength of the Stanley line.
(Stanhope, Elements of Empire, Reel 2, slot 411.)
No one at the Hotel Splendide saw the Velasquezes return to the hotel that night, but that was not unusual; they had sometimes in the past come in via the garage and gone straight up to their suite on a private elevator tube. Nor did anything seem unusual when they came down to breakfast at their usual time of eleven o’clock the next morning. There was a difference, though, in that they had actually slept that late this morning- they’d earned it.
Of course, Carmen and Carlos knew nothing of the arrests of the night before when the eager waiter hurried into the dining room with the breakfast they had punch-ordered ahead from their room. They could tell that something important had happened by the fact that he was accompanied this time by his captain, who carried both local morning newsrolls in his hand.
‘Good morning, gospodin and gospozha,’ the captain said respectfully. ‘You have perhaps not yet heard the extraordinary news on your receiver?’
‘Uh uh.’ Jules covered a yawn with his hand and shook his head. ‘We’re hardly awake yet.’ He was dressed in gold satin pantaloons and a short purple vest; Yvette wore her fabulous headpiece and a purple-and-gold morning robe that, while opaque in a few places here and there, was practically transparent everywhere else.
‘Did something happen that concerns us?’ Yvette asked languidly.
‘Most assuredly. It is something that rocks the faith of every honest citizen. The most tremendous, the most sensational scandal the Empire has seen in twenty years – and it happened right here on Algonia!’
He put the newsrolls down beside Yvette while he helped the waiter arrange the breakfast table most meticulously. ‘But perhaps I intrude. You will read of it later, I’m sure. You will naturally now want to eat your breakfast while it is still hot. Forgive me for intruding.’ The two hotel men accepted the Velasquezes’ usual generous gratuities and left the pair in peace.