"As we're all well aware," LePic shot back. Nesbitt glared at him, but that was as far as he was prepared to go under Pritchart's cold eye.
"All right," the President said. "We can sit here and argue over exactly what they meant all day, but I don't really think that's going to get us anywhere. I think we're all generally in agreement that this isn't precisely a forthcoming response to our last note to them?"
She looked around the conference table and saw nothing but agreement. Indeed, the secretaries who'd most strongly backed her against Giancola from the beginning seemed even angrier than the Secretary of State's supporters. She wondered how much of that was genuine exasperation with the Manties, and how much of it was frustration at seeing Giancola's predictions of the Star Kingdom's intransigence being borne out.
She made herself pause for a few seconds to acknowledge the danger of so much anger. Angry people didn't think clearly. They were vulnerable to the making of overly hasty decisions.
"On the other hand," she made herself say, "Tom and Denis are right to point out that there's at least a potential opening in their question about Trevor's Star. So I propose that we send them a reply specifically and definitively ceding sovereignty over that single system to them."
Several of Giancola's longest term supporters looked rebellious, but the Secretary of State himself nodded with every appearance of approval.
"What about their closing section?" LePic asked. "Should we take some notice of it and express our own desire to break this 'logjam' of theirs?"
"I'd advise against that, actually," Giancola said thoughtfully. LePic looked at him suspiciously, and the Secretary of State shrugged. "I don't know that it would be a bad idea, Denis; I'm just not sure it would be a good one. We've been to some lengths to establish our impatience with the way they've been fobbing us off for so long. If we send them a very brief note, possibly one which responds only to a single point from this one, " he tapped his own hardcopy of the Descroix note, "and does so in a way which makes it obvious that we're attempting to address their legitimate concerns—their legitimate concerns, Denis—but ignoring what Tony just called 'eyewash,' then we make it clear we're willing to be reasonable but not to retreat from our insistence that they negotiate seriously. In fact, the briefer the note, the more likely it is to make those points for us, particularly after how lengthy our previous notes have grown."
Pritchart regarded him with carefully concealed surprise. Much as she might distrust his ultimate ambitions, she couldn't fault his logic at the moment.
"I think it might be wiser to make at least some acknowledgment of their comments," LePic argued. "I don't see any harm in making an explicit connection between our assurances about Trevor's Star and their expressed desire to find some way to move forward."
"I understand your position, Denis," Giancola assured him. "You may well even be right. I just think we've used up so many millions of words talking to these people that it might be time to resort to a certain brutal brevity to make our point. Especially when the one we're making is our willingness to concede one of their demands. At the very least, the change of pace should be like letting a breath of fresh air into the negotiations."
"I think Arnold may have a point, Denis," Pritchart said. LePic looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.
"Maybe he does," the Attorney General conceded. "I suppose a part of it is how much time I spend wrestling with legal briefs and law codes. You don't want to risk any possibility of ambiguity in those, so you nail everything down in duplicate or triplicate."
"Very well, then," Pritchart said. "Let's see just how brief and concise—in a pleasant way, of course—we can be."
Arnold Giancola leaned back in the comfortable chair and gazed at the short, to the point message on his display. It was, indeed, brief and concise, and he felt a cold, unaccustomed tingle of something very like dread as he looked at it.
He'd made only one, very small change in it—deleted a single three-letter word—and for the first time, he felt a definite flicker of uncertainty. He'd known from the moment he'd set out to engineer Pritchart's foreign policy failure that this moment or one very like it would come, just as he'd always recognized the fire with which he was playing. But now the moment was here. By transmitting his version of this note to Grosclaude, he would finally and irretrievably commit himself. Despite the smallness of the change, this was no minor alteration, nothing anyone could possible explain away as a mere effort to clarify or emphasize. There would be no going back after it, and if the fact that he'd deliberately altered the President's language ever came out, his own political career would be over forever.
It was odd, he reflected, that he should come to this point . . . and that even now, he'd broken no laws. Perhaps there ought to be a law specifically requiring a secretary of state not to make any further adjustments to the agreed-upon language of a diplomatic note. Unfortunately, there wasn't. His quiet but detailed examination of the relevant law had made certain of that point. He'd broken at least a dozen State Department regulations dealing with the filing of true copies, but a good defense attorney could argue that they were only regulations, without statutory authority from Congress, and that as the Secretary of State, his own department's regulations were subject to his own revision. He'd need a sympathetic judge to make it stand up in court, but he happened to know where he could find one of those.
Not that technical questions of legality would make any significant difference to what would happen to him if his maneuver failed. Pritchart's fury would know no bounds, and his betrayal of his responsibility to her—and he was too self-honest to use any word besides 'betrayal,' even in the privacy of his own thoughts—would raise a firestorm of congressional support for her decision to fire him. Even those who would have agreed with his objectives would turn on him like starving wolves.
Yet even as he thought that, he knew he wasn't going to allow any doubts, any uncertainty, to deflect him. Not now. He'd come too far, risked too much. Besides, whatever Pritchart might think, it was obvious to him that the High Ridge Government would never agree to negotiate in good faith. He was in the process of educating the rest of the Cabinet to recognize that. In fact, he thought with grim amusement, he was actually educating Pritchart. But the truth hadn't gone fully home.
No. He needed one more lesson. One more Manticoran provocation. Hanriot, LePic, Gregory, and Theisman remained committed to the idea that somehow, some way, there had to be an accommodation which could be reached if only the Republic looked hard enough, waited long enough, possessed its soul in sufficient patience. The rest of the Cabinet was coming steadily around to Giancola's own position . . . and so, for that matter, was Eloise Pritchart, unless he missed his guess. But her present frustration was no substitute for the strength of will to look the Royal Manticoran Navy in the eye with the defiance that would make High Ridge recoil. She would still flinch if that happened, still fumble the chance to achieve her own goals. All he needed was one more push to generate the proper sense of crisis, reveal her weakness, and consolidate the Cabinet behind his solution to it.
He took one more look at the text of the note, inhaled deeply, and pressed the key authorizing its dispatch to Ambassador Grosclaude.
Chapter Forty Eight
"Excuse me, Sir."
Sir Edward Janacek looked up with an expression of intense irritation. His personal yeoman stood in the open door of his office, and the First Lord's irate expression headed rapidly towards thunderous. The man had been with him long enough to know better than to physically intrude into his office unannounced, especially when he was grappling with something like the latest report from a lunatic like Harrington.