Thirteen hours later Sam’s one chance in a million galloped triumphantly home.
The Office of Planetary Security had been less than 100 percent efficient in their sweep of Roderick Bantry and his colleagues in Hawaii. Seti-corp’s O-CLIP computer had been disabled and all of the personal or professional computers used by the dozen missing scientists destroyed or stolen. But Bantry had been a conspirator for too many years now to be so easily thwarted: it was Bruce who eventually found a Bantry-devised password guarding a file hidden in a Bank of Hawaii computer in the Big Island resort town of Kona-Kailua. After that, accessing the file from halfway around the world was nearly instantaneous.
The file contained all the information needed to link an O-CLIP computer with the six tiny graviton readers presently circling the Earth in geosynchronous orbit. It was another twenty minutes before the monitor displayed a now ultra-sharp—though still black and white—image of the general chairman of the Council of Nine having an intimate dinner in the private dining room of a Swiss auberge with a young lady who was manifestly not his wife.
“Track in on that date on the menu,” directed Colonel Favre-Trognon. “Thirteen May, 2073—fifteen months ago!” She stood rigid before the screen, then whirled and threw her arms around Sam. Before he could react, she had kissed him once on each cheek and then a second time. “Mon Senateur, you’ve done it, you’ve done it! We now have a weapon to fight the Federation! Je vous salute!”
“After that it was like shooting ducks in a barrel,” said Sam to Roderick Bantry. They were strolling slowly through the sun-dappled paths of the hardwood forest surrounding the Pocono safe house. Somewhere within the bowels of the mansion were Linda Rawlings and Bantry’s Big Island co-workers.
“You got me back, Sam,” said Bantry huskily, his eyes intent on the narrow trail. “I’ll never forget that. They were just about to start interrogating us with perceptualization enhancement, you know. I don’t know why they’d delayed it. They’d already used it on Linda three weeks ago after she’d blabbed too much to the wrong person at a fashion show in Milan, the bitch. That’s how they found out about the scanner in the first place.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“After the PE I don’t know what they were going to do with us. It takes a trained expert like Emily a lot of time to wipe out even a tiny portion of a memory using an O-CLIP. So why would they bother when there’s such a simpler way?”
Sam nodded somber agreement. “And if they’d interrogated you right away under PE you’d have told them about that backup file in Kona.”
Bantry shuddered. “And you’d never have figured out how to access the readers. And I’d be…” He gulped audibly and tapped the forest floor with the tip of his shoe.
“Maybe, maybe not. I think there was at least a fighting chance that Bruce and the other computer types might have figured it out on their own.”
“Whatever. I owe you, Sam, you and Bruce, I really owe you.” Bantry shook his head as if still marveling at the narrowness of his escape. “But how did you do it, how did you get them to just let us go?”
“It wasn’t pretty,” said Sam, stopping to lean against the trunk of a particularly imposing oak and study a patch of hazy blue sky, “and I’m not particularly proud of it. But I couldn’t think of any other way of doing it. What we did was to make a list of every reputed scandal or aspersion or embarrassment that had ever been linked to any of the members of the Council of Nine, as well as a dozen or so other Federation movers and shakers, including the top four people in the OPS.”
“You mean all the dirty linen—”
“I’m afraid so. With the French intelligence service working with us it wasn’t very hard to get a list of hundreds of rumors, stories, and innuendos. After that it was just a matter of tracking some of them down.” Sam shook his head despondently. “You’d be depressed at how many of the really awful things that were alleged about some of the very best of them were actually true. The scanner does not give a pretty picture of the human race, Roderick.”
Bantry turned away to hide the flush that reddened his cheeks as he remembered his own horrible humiliation of four years before. Without the pitiless testimony of the scanner, he knew, he would still be married to the only woman he had ever loved. “Don’t rub it in,” he muttered.
“Rub it in? What do you… oh. No, I was thinking about… about other things.”
About the second-in-command of the Office of Planetary Security who had somehow managed to conceal his youthful activities as a member of an Australian pain cult.
About the Council of Nine member who had locked his first wife in a cellar dungeon for three months until she had consented to a divorce, just as rumor had always said.
About the justice of the High Tribunal who really did spend occasional weekends in the company of very young boys, the younger the better.
About the Federation’s new Minister of Environmental Coordination who really had squirreled away $7 million in a Liechtenstein bank account for his role nine years earlier in the coverup of the Paraguayan Black Death.
And most shocking of all, about Maheyna Mbluhei, the revered Executive Secretary of the Council of Nine. Thirty-seven years ago, the nagging innuendo had it, this saint-like creature who had lifted herself to the presidency of Kenya by her tireless efforts on behalf of the children of Africa, had participated in the massacre of an entire village of dissident tribesmen on the Lotagipi Swamp.
Silently grieving for the human race, Sam had watched the truth unfold on the O-CLIP’s screen. It reminded him of the painluster horrors he had once devoted his life to expunging. The truth was stark and simple. And just as the rumor had said.
“I felt slimy,” muttered Sam, “dirty, awful at having to watch the things we saw. But we had to, Roderick, we had to—if we wanted to get you back.”
“I know, Sam. And I’ll never forget—”
“Oh, it wasn’t just for you that I did it. It was for everyone else, like those poor villagers who got themselves massacred by Her Holiness. And for all the other poor people who right now are getting themselves screwed and murdered and robbed by gangsters and politicians and petty warlords all over the world, and who never get a break from anyone. They’re the ones I did it for, Roderick, they’re the ones who need the scanner to protect them, all the little people of the world.” Sam pushed himself away from the tree, his face bleak. “And by God, Roderick, I’ll see that they get it!”
Bantry stared at him wide-eyed, half-frightened by the intensity of Sam’s grimness. “And that’s what you told them, Maheyna Mbluhei, and all the rest? You just out-and-out blackmailed them? You blackmailed the entire Federation?”
“What’s worked for me before will work again. Anyway, we didn’t call it blackmail, we called it a political negotiation. We—I and everyone in that room under the Jura Mountains—will forget about everything we saw—and recorded, Roderick, recorded very, very thoroughly—and they’ll forget about trying to suppress the scanner, at least entirely. We drew up a protocol about how it’ll be allowed to be used, with certain restrictions, but right now I can’t remember all the details. You’ll be reading about it soon enough. After—”
“After what, Sam?”
“After you’ve been to London to introduce the scanner to a breathless world, Roderick. And, I imagine, particularly after you’ve been to Stockholm someday to pick up your Nobel.” Sam took a step onto the path that led back to the old stone mansion and his wife and children. “And maybe someday you’ll remember what it cost.”