"It's an outpatient procedure, Andrew," she said, after a moment, shifting on the limousine's luxurious seat. "That doesn't necessarily mean there's no discomfort, even with quick-heal."
"No, My Lady. Of course not," he said just a bit hastily. She looked at him levelly, and after a moment, he grinned wryly.
"Sorry, My Lady. I don't mean to hover. It's just, well...."
He shrugged and flipped both hands, palms uppermost.
"I know, Andrew." She smiled at him, and Nimitz bleeked in amusement from her lap. "And I really am just fine."
He nodded, and she looked back out the window. Nimitz rose in her lap, careful about where he let his weight fall, and leaned against her, pressing his muzzle very gently against her cheek. His buzzing purr vibrated into her comfortingly, and she let his love and support flow through her. At the moment, she needed them badly.
The realization surprised her, yet it was true. Her mind kept returning to that tiny embryo, floating now in the replication tube. Such a minute bit of tissue... and yet, how enormous that unborn child loomed in her own heart. She felt hollow, as if she had been emptied of something unutterably precious. Intellectually, she knew her child was far safer where she-or he-was, yet her emotions were something else. A part of her felt as if she'd abandoned her baby, left it in a coldly sterile, antiseptic storage box, like some bit of inconvenient luggage.
She hugged Nimitz gently, wishing with all her heart that Hamish could have accompanied her to Briarwood. He'd wanted to. In fact, he'd tried to insist on coming, until she'd pointed out that his presence would tend to somewhat undermine her insistence on asserting her privacy right to not disclose the father's identity. Bad enough if someone had spotted her and her detail at the Star Kingdom's premier fertility and reproductive center without seeing her there in company with the First Lord of Admiralty. And yet, at this moment, she longed to feel his arms about her.
Well, she'd feel them this evening, she told herself. And, at least as importantly, she would feel Emily's support. Perhaps she'd been an adoptive Grayson too long, she thought, her lips twitching in a smile of mingled tenderness and amusement. She wondered how many other Manticorans would have found the thought of spending an intimate evening in the company of the wife of the father of her unborn child comforting, yet that was the only word she could think of to describe it.
And she didn't really care how bizarre it might once have seemed to her pre-Grayson self.
Chapter Fourteen
"Well, well, well... there you are," Jean-Claude Nesbittt murmured.
He studied the lines of alphanumeric text on his display for several seconds, then frowned thoughtfully and began very carefully copying the critical passages of the document for safekeeping. He made certain he had everything he needed, then closed the file and withdrew from the "secure" memory bank as tracelessly as he had entered it.
He punched up another file, running down the checklist he'd assembled over the last three arduous weeks. Putting it together would have been a full-time job under almost any circumstances. Given the fact that he couldn't afford to let any of his erstwhile subordinates guess he was working on a completely private black project of his own, it had become a monumental pain in the neck. But unless he was very mistaken, he had all the pieces he needed now.
He reached the end of the list, grunted in satisfaction, and then closed that file, as well. It wasn't easy. In fact, it was extraordinarily tempting to move ahead quickly now that he'd completed the preparatory groundwork. But it was late, he was tired, and he'd seen entirely too many fatigue-induced errors in his time. Besides, Giancola's instructions to replace Grosclaude's letter of instruction to his attorneys had been carried out over two months ago. Even if something happened to Grosclaude before the colonel got around to completing the rest of project, he was covered. So best to take things slowly and cautiously.
He powered down his console, nodded to his own reflection in the blank display, and pushed back his chair. Time for bed, he thought, but first, a well-earned nightcap.
"Are you really serious about this, Boss?" Special Senior Inspector Abrioux asked quizzically.
"And just what about my clearly phrased directive makes you think I might not be?" Kevin Usher, Director of the Federal Investigative Agency of the Republic of Haven inquired.
Usher was a huge, powerfully built man. Danielle Abrioux, on the other hand, was delicately petite. Like Usher, she'd come up through the Resistance before joining the FIA, and if she looked like a slender, brown-haired child, appearances could be deceiving. She was a very dangerous "child"... as the shades of over a dozen assassinated InSec and StateSec officials-and far more currently carnate inmates of the Republic's penal systems-would have vehemently attested. At the moment, she was perched on the corner of Usher's desk, sipping coffee, and a matching coffee mug sat on his blotter, because Abrioux was one of his most trusted investigators. She knew all about his alleged drunkenness, and it was a relief to be able to abandon the charade during their meetings.
"Boss," she said now, her tone just a bit plaintive, "you know you've got a screwy sense of humor. Just look at what you put Ginny and Victor through, for God's sake! So, yeah, when you call me in for something like this, I've got to wonder whether or not you're trying to see if my legwill come off if you pull it hard enough."
"My sense of humor isn't the least bit screwy," he said with dignity. "Everyone else's sense of humor is. But in this particular instance, I'm serious as a heart attack, Danny."
"My God." Abrioux lowered her coffee cup, her smile fading. "You really are, aren't you?"
"I am, and I wish to hell I wasn't."
Abrioux felt her stomach congealing into a lump of frozen lead. She set her coffee cup down and pushed the saucer away from her.
"Let me get this straight, Kevin," she said very quietly. "You're telling me you think we may have gone back to war against the Manties not because they altered our diplomatic traffic, but because we did?"
"Yes." Usher's always deep voice sounded like a gravel crusher, and he inhaled deeply. "I'm not saying I'm convinced that's what happened, but I'm afraid it may be, Danny."
"Why?" she demanded.
"Partly because of Wilhelm's reports." Usher tipped back in his float chair. "We lost a lot of our best conduits when we took down Saint-Just's organization, but he's still got a few sources in place inside the Manty Foreign Office. Not as highly placed as they were, but high enough to have access to the sorts of insider shop talk permanent assistant undersecretaries get to hear. And according to them, everyone-everyone, from the top down-is convinced we did it."
"That may not indicate anything," Abrioux countered. "Putting something like this together successfully would have required very tight security. Not only that, but it would have been put together by the High Ridge Government, not the current one. So anyone who'd been in on it would probably be out of office by now, anyway."
"Agreed. But the people who are so thoroughly convinced we're the heavies of this particular piece are the people who replaced High Ridge's cronies. Every other bit of gossip Wilhelm's sources have given us only confirms the utter contempt they have for their immediate predecessors. If there were even the tiniest sniff of a possibility that anyone in the High Ridge crowd had been responsible for this, someone would have picked up on it by now. You know as well as I do there are always conspiracy theorists hiding in the woodwork, Danny. Combine that with the blinding rage most of Manticore feels for anyone remotely associated with the High Ridge Government, and one of those theorists would certainly have pounced on any possibility, even if it was only as one of those shivery 'no-shit' urban legends to share over a coffee break. And no one's dropped a single word about it. Not one."