Still, he'd had to give them a lot already. It was just a crude fact of life that a person seeking to defect had less in the way of bargaining power than the people in a position to provide a new life for him or her. And neither Anton nor Victor was in any mood to be charitable.
It spoke well for Jack McBryde, true enough—even Victor would allow this much—that he'd come to understand and detest the system created over the centuries by what he called the Mesan Alignment. But it was still appalling that any man with his obvious intelligence—even genuine sensitivities—could have supported that system as long as he had, in such a central capacity, before he finally turned against it.
As Victor had quipped sarcastically after their third meeting with McBryde, paraphrasing a line from one of his favorite movies, it was as if an officer at one of the ancient Nazi death camps was suddenly to exclaim: "I am shocked—shocked!—to discover genocide at Auschwitz!" (Anton had understood the reference, but he'd had to explain it to Yana.)
That probably wasn't entirely fair. Anton pointed out that the initial impulses that eventually led to the Mesan Alignment had clearly been idealistic, which it was awfully hard to say of the vision of the ancient despot Hitler. This was hardly the first time in human history, after all, that a political movement (or religion, for that matter) had begun with the best of intentions and turned into something which its founders would never have imagined might be the horrible end result. He went so far as to point out—after clearing his throat—that Victor himself bore an uncanny resemblance to many of the members of the Bolshevik Cheka in the early years of the Russian revolution almost two centuries before the Diaspora.
Victor knew what Anton was referring to; and, after stiffening for a moment, had admitted (even with a slight smile) there was possibly a certain resemblance. In the years since he'd met Kevin and Ginny Usher, Cachat had become a genuine student of history.
"It's still not the same, Anton," he'd said. "If you know that much about ancient history, then you also know that within two decades of the original revolution the tyrant named Stalin had murdered almost all of those early revolutionaries and replaced them with his own lickspittles. Rob Pierre and especially Saint-Just tried to do the same thing with the Aprilists in our own revolution—and damn near succeeded.
"But we're talking centuries here, Anton, not decades. Centuries during the course of which these people committed the foulest crimes you can imagine, condemning generations of other people to slavery and brutality—and Jack McBryde finally starts choking on it, more than half a millennium after it began and after enjoying a long career himself at the trade?"
By the time he'd finished, Victor had been as outwardly angry as Anton had ever seen him.
"So . . . what?" he said. "Do you want to tell McBryde to take a flying leap into hellfire and be damned to him?"
That had been enough to crack Cachat's quiet fury. "Well . . . no, of course not." He even managed a chuckle. "I'm not crazy, after all. McBryde could be one of Shaitan's top underlings and I'd work with him under these circumstances, if he wanted to defect from Hell. Holding my nose, maybe, but I'd do it. We have far too much to gain—and that's not even counting these latest hints McBryde's been giving us."
Anton looked skeptical. "Do you really think he's got his hands on some sort of super-secret technical developments—assuming those developments exist at all?"
"I don't think McBryde himself knows diddly squat about starship design, which is what he's been hinting at. But if I'm interpreting some other remarks of his properly, he's got someone else with him. Someone whom he's kept out of sight from us up until now."
Anton stared at the wall, thinking about it. There had been the suggestion, in some of what McBryde had said in their last meeting the day before yesterday, that—if you interpreted it this way, and then tweaked it that way—it was not for nothing they called this trade a hall of mirrors—he wanted some form of transport off the planet that was more elaborate than a single person would need. Anton had been a little puzzled by it at the time, in fact. McBryde was a security specialist himself, so he knew perfectly well that the easiest and safest way to smuggle someone off a planet with security precautions as tight at Mesa's was to disguise them in some way or another as someone else. The more people you tried to do that for, the harder it got—and the increase in the risk was exponential, not linear.
Alternatively . . .
He sucked in a breath. "How many people then, do you think?"
"At a guess, just one," replied Victor. "McBryde doesn't have a wife or children—or significant other of any kind, so far as we've been able to determine. I get the feeling he's rather close to his family, but I'd be astonished if someone with his training and experience would do anything to compromise them. There's no possible way he could get all of them off the planet, parents and siblings both. And for all we know some of his brothers and sisters have children of their own."
Cachat leaned forward over the kitchen table, leaning his weight on his arms. "He's putting them all at a considerable risk already, it seems to me. Once he leaves, there'll be hell to pay, even if there's no indication that any of them knew what he was planning. If this were Haven under Pierre and Saint-Just, his family would probably all be executed anyway. But from everything we've been able to determine, this Mesan Alignment doesn't operate that crudely."
Anton considered Victor's argument, in his slow and methodical way. Cachat, who knew him very well by now, simply waited patiently. In fact, he took advantage of the pause to make a fresh pot of coffee and find out what Yana had learned. As she did every morning, the Amazon had gone out to check the astrogation records. Entries and exits from the system by all merchant and passenger ships—most military craft, too—were kept up to date and publicly available.
Checking those records on a daily basis was a perfectly legal activity, but it was always possible that someone might be monitoring them. So, Yana used a different method every day to search the data. Sometimes a public library, and never the same one twice in a row; sometimes the commercial shipping offices—there were lots of those in the city; and once she'd even gone down to the Extrasolar Commerce Authority itself and used their computers.
"The Hali Sowle just entered the system again," she said quietly, not wanting to disturb Anton's train of thought. She didn't know Zilwicki as well as Victor did, but she had a near-superstitious respect for the man's fabled ability to work his through any problem.
Victor nodded. "Any word yet as to their permitted length of stay?"
She shook her head. "No, but it'll probably be on the records by tomorrow. No later than the day after that, for sure. I'll say this for Mesa. Their bureaucrats aren't slouches."
Victor chuckled. "And this is . . . praise?"
Hearing a slight noise behind them, Victor turned and saw that Anton had moved his chair back from the table a little.
"That didn't take as long as I thought." He held up the pot. "Fresh coffee?"
Zilwicki extended his cup. "There isn't really that much to figure. I think you're right, Victor—and I'm pretty sure McBryde will come out into the open with it at our next meeting. It'll be one more person that he wants us to smuggle out with him, and that person will be a scientist or technician of some kind who actually has the knowledge he's been hinting about."
"You don't think he's faking anything, in other words?"
"No." Slowly, Anton shook his blocky head. "Victor, unless I'm very badly mistaken, Jack McBryde is starting to get desperate and wants off the planet as soon as possible."
Victor frowned. "Why? He's essentially the head of security here. Well, one of them, anyway. But you'd be hard pressed to think of anyone who could disguise what he's doing as well as he could. Even if someone does spot him up to something questionable, he could almost certainly provide some sort of half-reasonable explanation. A good enough one, at least, to give him time to make his escape."