"Intrigued would be a better word."
"Oh?" Armbruster chuckled grimly. "Well, you'll be more than just intrigued by the time I finish, Stan."
"Looks like things are finally moving," Aston said as he paged through the folder in his lap.
"At last," Ludmilla threw in without looking up from her book. She was tipped back in a chair, reading a copy of The Marine Officer's Guide.
"Give us a break, Milla," Morris protested half-seriously. "You knew the first layer'd be the hardest to set up, but we're starting to make progress now. And every senior man we clear gives us that much more reach down to the lower levels."
"And that much more chance for a 'normal' leak," Hastings said sourly.
"True," Morris agreed with a sigh. He lit another cigarette, and she glared at him.
"I'm going to tell Rhoda you're cheating."
"Snitch," he said, and took a deep drag. "And don't worry too much about leaks. People like Loren and Wilkins know how to keep secrets. It's the congressional side I worry about."
"Don't," Aston said, making a check beside a name in his folder. "The President isn't going to tell them." He chuckled nastily at Morris's raised eyebrow. "You hadn't heard? He decided last night. Just what we needed-a House Speaker with the wrong EEG and an IQ equal to his shoe size! I'm just as happy, though. This way Armbruster can brief all the oversight committees with the cover story, and we can get on with the real job without a lot of elected busybodies blabbing to the press."
"That's a pretty bitter view of your elected representatives, Dick," Ludmilla said, glancing up from her book at last.
"But a realistic one," Morris replied before Aston could. "Some of them-maybe even a majority of them, though I wouldn't want to get too optimistic on that point-are probably honorable human beings. But a bunch of them are neither honorable nor anything I'd like to call human, and a single asshole can blow any operation. What's that old saying? 'Any two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead ... unless he was a politician.' "
"Something like that," Hastings agreed. She looked over at Aston. "How's the strike team selection coming, Admiral?"
"Keep calling me 'Admiral' and the first strike is going to land right on your head," Aston growled. She made a face, and he went on with a smile. "Not too bad, so far. We've got a Marine major with a head injury from a training accident last year. They ran lots of tests, and he's got a great, big, beautiful spike right where we need it. Looks like a good man, too."
"You're making it an all-Marine operation after all?" Morris asked interestedly.
"I may. I'm trying to find as many key people as I can without any new testing, and life'll be a lot simpler if they're all from the same branch of the service. And much as it pains me to admit it, Marines may be even better for this kind of operation."
"But how are you going to decide what firepower you need?" Ludmilla wanted to know. "We still haven't solved that one."
"Oh, sorry." Morris rubbed his forehead and smiled apologetically at her. "I should've told you. Admiral McLain's arranged for the Army to take a couple of obsolete tanks that were earmarked for scrapping out of the disposal queue and hand them over to us for testing purposes, instead. Of course," he added sardonically, "they don't know exactly what we'll be testing."
"All right!" Aston said, grinning. "How soon?"
"I'm not sure. Sometime tomorrow or the next day, I think."
"Where?" Ludmilla demanded. "It's got to be a secure place."
"Oh, we've found one that's plenty secure." Morris grinned. "There's a big underground chamber out in New Mexico. They dug it for the nuclear test series we carried out after the START II treaty finally crapped out, but the final two or three shots got scrubbed as part of the CPI nuclear reduction negotiations with China, Pakistan, and India last year."
"Sounds good," Aston agreed, then closed his folder with a snap. "Anything else from Loren?"
"He's got the cover crisis team in place. The plan is for the VP to take over with Loren as his 'assistant.' I think Loren's a little pissed at being stuck over there, but he and Wilkins will make sure we get copies of anything they bird-dog for us. Frankly, they're more likely to spot something than we are, since they can use the whole security setup. But our team's the only one who can recognize what they spot."
"It'll just have to do," Aston said pensively. "I only wish we had some idea what the bastard is thinking about right now."
The Troll was exhilarated. At last, thanks to a penniless, embittered drifter named Leonard Stillwater, he'd found his final element.
It was a shame about Stillwater, the Troll chided himself. Something might have been made of it if he'd been a bit more careful. He would have to watch himself. The pleasure of raping human minds was addictive, but he must learn to ration it. Stillwater, for example, had held a promise its shoddy exterior and slovenly thought patterns had hidden until too late.
The Troll checked automatically on his servomechs as they completed the day's camouflage. His progress across the United States had been slower than expected, but that was not without advantages. He'd finally acquired enough data on the humans' primitive radar to build a crude but effective ECM system against it, and there had been time to gain more information.
The Stillwater human had given him the most astonishing data of all, and the Troll had stopped north of the Broken Bow Indian Reservation in the Quachita Mountains of Oklahoma to ponder. Such a lovely revelation deserved careful consideration.
It was odd, but he'd never really wondered how humans thought about other humans, and it had come as a shock when he ripped into the Stillwater human's brain and found the hatred festering at its core. So much like his own in so many ways, and in a human brain! Marvelous.
The Troll had never heard of the White People's Party, nor of the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan-not until his combat mechs brought him the hitchhiking Stillwater. It had been dirty and terrified, yet there'd been something about it, the Troll thought-a sort of mean-spirited, vicious defiance under its whining panic. Perhaps that should have alerted him, caused him to proceed more cautiously.
Perhaps, but the human mattered far less than the hatred the Troll had discovered. He'd recognized it instantly as yet another chink in the armor of his human prey-and one so well suited to his needs!
It would require care, but the unthinking hatred of minds like Stillwater's would lend itself to his manipulation, and their need for a leader to think for them would make it much, much easier.
He only had to find another Stillwater, one with more polish and the wit to understand what the Troll could offer it.
Nikolai Stepanovich Nekrasov enjoyed his position as the Russian Federation's ambassador to the United States. He would not have cared to admit it to many people, but he rather liked Americans. True, they were incredibly ill-organized, undisciplined, and spoiled, with more than their fair share of national chauvinism (a vice, he admitted privately, his own people shared in full measure). They were absolutely convinced that the political changes in his own nation were the direct result of their shining example, while its economic woes stemmed solely from a failure to emulate them properly. Possibly as a consequence, they retained a deep-seated distrust of his people which was matched only by Russia's suspicion of them. They were further handicapped by their ridiculous (and, in his opinion, naive) insistence that individuals were more important than the state, and their feelings were hurt with absurd ease if anyone even suggested that they were not universally beloved just because they enjoyed a material lifestyle most of the rest of the planet only dreamed of.
But he was willing to admit that, having been raised as a prototypical Marxist-Leninist new man, his own perceptions of them might, perhaps, be just a tiny bit flawed. And he also found them generous and polite, and, unlike many of his erstwhile comrades in the Party-good democrats all, now, of course!-he rather liked Americans' ingrained refusal to bow to power or position. The pre-Yeltsin Party would have understood Americans far better (and possibly even have remained in power, he thought), if its members could just have grasped that the European class system had never really caught on in North America despite the best efforts of its own leftist politicians.