Grantville, State of Thuringia-Franconia
Ed Piazza, President of the State of Thuringia-Franconia rubbed his eyes. “Are those the latest production reports, Anton?”
Anton Roedel, former clerk for the city council of Rudolstadt and now Executive Secretary to the President, nodded. “Yes, Mr. President. The production numbers from the new coal mines should not be considered a basis for long-term projection, though. Their operating managers indicate that—”
“Yes, Anton,” Piazza smiled, “I was listening when you read their letters to us.”
Farther down the conference table—a battered brown institutional slab that had started life in the teacher’s lounge of Grantville’s elementary school—Vince Marcantonio, Piazza’s chief of staff, stretched and groaned. “Please tell me that’s the last of the reports, Anton.”
“Yes sir, I thought it prudent to conclude with—”
There was a knock on the door.
Warner Barnes of the State Department sighed. “Now what?”
Francisco Nasi, Mike Stearns’ spymaster, shrugged. “That would be the arrival of ‘unofficial’ official business.”
“Huh?”
Piazza grinned. “C’mon, Warner, you’ve worked in the State Department long enough to recognize euphemistic ‘code’ when you hear it.”
“Oh no,” Barnes sighed, “not covert crap. Not now. That shit takes forever, and I want to get home.”
“Before the evening gets cold?”
“Before my dinner gets cold and my wife blows her stack. This happens every time you and Francisco come back from Bamberg with a ‘special agenda’ for us to go through. This time, I don’t think I’ve even seen her in the past seventy-two hours. She’s out the door before I’m out of bed. I get back after she stops waiting up. You’re a damned home wrecker, Mr. President.”
Piazza nodded. “My apologies, but let’s not keep our ‘unexpected’ guest waiting.” Raising his voice, he called, “Come in!”
“Watch,” growled Secretary of the Interior George Chehab from his sulky slouch at the very end of the table, “I’ll bet this becomes the longest, drawn out business of the whole damned evening. Mark my words—”
But then his jaw shut with a snap, followed by a guilty gulp: Eddie Cantrell stuck his head into the room. He looked a little puzzled as he scanned all the faces.
“Uh . . . hello, Mr. President, gentlemen. I’m sorry if I’m interrupting. I was told you’d be concluded by this ti—”
Piazza smiled and waved him in. “There’s always more work to do than there are hours in which to do it, Eddie. No worries.”
The recording secretary looked at Eddie, then Piazza, then turned a new page, and started scribbling.
Eddie glanced uncertainly at Anton and back again to Piazza.
Piazza nodded faintly, so faintly that he was pretty sure that the only two people who saw it were Eddie, who was looking straight at him, and Nasi, who saw everything, anyway. “No need to itemize the report from Admiral Simpson, Eddie. Just leave it with us. We’ll probably go over it after Mr. Roedel departs.”
Anton seemed to start slightly, then resumed his scribbling.
Eddie nodded. “I understand, sir. Perfectly.”
And he and Piazza shared a smile, just as they shared a complete understanding of why a review of the report was being deferred. By waiting until Anton was gone, there would be no official record of Admiral Simpson’s strident, not to say fulminative, arguments about the materials, money, specialists, priorities, and other assets he wanted—no: needed!—in order to have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting a blue water navy ready by the promised date.
“Those folders under your arm,” Piazza said, nodding at the leather-bound attachés that passed for “folders” in Early Modern Germany, “I take it they also contain brand new requests from Admiral Simpson?”
Eddie’s smile was rueful. “Yes, Mr. President. They most certainly do.”
“And what would the esteemed admiral want now?”
“Well, pretty much everything he wrote you about last month. Except lots more of it.”
Piazza put out his hand for the folders. Eddie moved to walk them over. Piazza saw the limp, remembered the missing leg, jumped to his feet to get the folders, mentally cursing his forgetfulness and excusing it at the same time. Damn it! Eddie was just a kid—just a smart, awkward kid—only four years ago, staring at cheerleaders, dealing with acne, and coping with the low ceiling of his possibilities in a small West Virginia mining town. And now he’s a handicapped veteran. But I still see that kid, when I look at him.
And that was when Piazza saw the look on Eddie’s face: that “kid” wanted to walk the folders over himself. And the way he held himself as he limped closer—straighter, in a military posture—shamed the image of Eddie Cantrell, Nice Kid, forever out of Piazza’s mind. He was sad to see that old image go, but felt an almost tearful pride at the image that had now permanently replaced it: Lieutenant Commander Edward Cantrell, veteran and hero at the tender age of twenty-three.
Piazza extended his hand for the folders that Eddie could now reach out to him and he said, quietly, and as seriously as he had ever said anything in his life, “Thank you for bringing these to us, Commander Cantrell.”
“My pleasure, sir.”
“—And my duty,” Piazza heard as the unspoken subtext behind those words. He nodded. “Before you go, Commander, we have something that you need to take with you.”
“A return communiqué, Mr. President?”
Piazza smiled. “No, Commander.” He turned. Francisco Nasi held out a large, varnished wood box, with a strangely intense look in his dark eyes, as if he was hoping they would convey something that he could not, or dare not, frame as spoken words.
“Sir?” said Eddie, puzzled, as Piazza turned and proffered the box to him.
“Open it.”
Eddie did and seemed to redden for the briefest moment. “Is this—?”
“That’s the finished medal, Commander. Allow me.”
Piazza took the box back, lifted out the first Navy Cross that the United States of Europe had awarded to a living recipient, and put it around Eddie’s neck. Who straightened and saluted.
Piazza straightened, “For your actions in and around Wismar, 1633, as per the citations read at the official ceremony,” and saluted back. Then he relaxed a bit. “I know you did this last year in Magdeburg, with all the pomp and circumstance, but since the artisans and politicos were still arguing over the final design of the medal, and hadn’t gotten around to—”
“Thank you, sir.” Eddie looked Piazza in the eyes and then around the table. “It means more than I can say that you—that all of you—did this.” All present had risen and come to attention as the real medal was conferred. Then Eddie frowned and glanced back in the box. “Uh—”
“Yes, Commander?”
“Kind of a big box for a medal, sir. And damned heavy.”
Piazza smiled again. “I thought a congratulatory gift was in order. To commemorate the occasion and to help you in your future endeavors.”
Eddie lifted out the wooden panel upon which the medal had rested. He stared, and then looked up at Piazza. “How did you know?”
Francisco Nasi may have smiled briefly. “I was sitting just down the table from you at your state dinner in Magdeburg last year. Perhaps you remember having a friendly dispute with the admiral over preferred side arms?”
Eddie lifted out the gift with almost reverent hands. An almost slender automatic pistol caught the light and sent gleams skittering off a blued hammer. “An HP-35. Manufactured just after the World War II, if I read the markings correctly.”
Piazza grinned. “You do. Although you may be the only person in this world who would call it an HP-35. ‘Browning Hi-Power’ was the preferred term in the States, Commander.”
Eddie, completely oblivious to Piazza’s correction, turned the weapon over to confirm that no magazine was inserted. “How—where did you find this?”
Piazza looked down, shrugged, and was slightly annoyed when Nasi almost drawled, “Actually, it wasn’t hard to find at all. It seems a person we know very well had it in his possession. Had an opinion of the gun similar to your own, Commander, and chose it over many others. Even though it was distinctly nonregulation in your up-time US Army. This person has often claimed that it never failed him, and that he preferred the larger magazine size to the stopping power of the larger . . . er, ‘forty-fives’?” Nasi sent a glance at Piazza, checking his terminology.
Eddie followed Nasi’s gaze. “You, Mr. President? This is your gun?”
“Was my gun, Commander. It is yours, now. Use it with pride and honor. As I know you will.”
“Sir, I can’t take it. I couldn’t—”
“Rubbish, Commander. You’ve already taken it. And it’s the right gift for a young man who has no choice but to go in harm’s way with only one leg. By comparison, I am an increasingly paunchy man whose fate is to sit at a big desk although I have two perfectly good legs. Seriously, now, who has more use for that gun? Who needs every bit of advantage they can get?”
Eddie’s eyes raised from the weapon and fixed on Piazza’s face, assessing. “Mr. President, you’re about fifty-five, now, right?”
“Not a day over fifty-four. Don’t put me in the grave any earlier than I have to go, Commander!”
“So during your tour in the Army, you were in—?”
“Yes, I was there, Commander. And since the Browning worked in the jungles on one side of this planet, I’m pretty sure it’ll work just as well in the jungles on the other side. I hope you don’t have to use it at all, of course, but if you do, you may find it’s nice to have a thirteen-round magazine when you can’t usually see what you’re shooting at very well—if at all.” He left unspoken the fact that there were plenty of Glocks and M-9s to be had, which boasted even larger magazine sizes. But the Hi-Power was renowned for its reliability and kindness to small-handed or easily unbalanced shooters—as Eddie Cantrell now might be.
Eddie looked down and held the gun firmly with both hands, almost as if it were a holy relic. For a second, Piazza saw the eager, earnest kid again.
Eddie looked up. “I don’t know what to say, Mr. President.”
Piazza laughed. “I think ‘thanks,’ will be sufficient. Otherwise, I can tell you’re going to get maudlin on me. Well, more maudlin. Now look here, Commander, I do have one bone to pick with you.”
“Sir?”
“How dare you come down to Grantville and not bring your bride?”
“Sir, I didn’t think that protocol—”
Always Earnest Eddie. “Protocol be damned, Commander, we just wanted to see her again.”
“‘See her,’ sir?”
Really? You still don’t get the ribbing? “See her, Commander. Perceive her form. Appreciate her beauty. Feast upon her feminine pulchritude with our own, envious eyes. You get the picture?” And he grinned.
Before Eddie could get the surprised look off his face, George Chehab rasped, “How could you not know what we meant, son? She’s a class-A knockout, that Danish Ann Margaret of yours.”
“Uh, Mr. Chehab, her name is actually Anne Cathrine.”
“Trust me son, she is a young Ann Margret. But more curvaceous.”
“Now George,” warned Vince Marcantonio, “let’s not get too blatant in our admiration of the young lady.”
Chehab smiled and shrugged. “Okay, but damn, I confess to disappointment that she didn’t come down with you, Commander: severe, genuine, personal disappointment. She’s as charming as she is beautiful, and we’d have liked to show her more of Grantville last year.”
Eddie nodded. “Yes, sir. A return visit tops our list of things to do. When time permits.”
And the room became quiet again, the jocularity chased out by the shadow of things to come. Serious things. Time to get back to and conclude the matters at hand, Piazza admitted. “Well, Commander, we are very glad to have seen you and presented you with your long overdue medal—and gift. I take it you will be returning to your duties immediately?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not even time to sneak a quick visit to Copenhagen?”
Eddie shook his head. “No, sir. Much as I’d like to. What with being a new husband and all.”
“Amen to that,” breathed Warner Barnes sympathetically, who knew because Piazza had briefed them months ago, that Anne Cathrine was “inexplicably” not with her husband in Luebeck. Of course, there was a simple, if unpleasant explanation for her absence: she had been purposely kept away from Luebeck at the behest of a group of Swedish officers. Anne Cathrine, they correctly asserted, was inquisitive, clever, enthusiastic, and probably could have deduced military secrets from fragments of conversations overheard in Eddie’s quarters. Of course, the great majority of the command staff also held that she’d have been even more likely to die rather than give up those secrets. But there had been concerns among some ultranationalist Swedes that a new bride—and a Danish one, at that—should not be in close proximity to secret projects and documents. Nonsense of course, and driven by their distrust of Copenhagen’s loyalty to Stockholm in the forcibly reforged Union of Kalmar. But those officers wielded enough political power that some concessions had to be made, and this one was consented to because it imposed politically-inconsequential costs upon only two persons: a love-lorn and sex-starved new husband named Eddie Cantrell and his pining bride.
“That’s hard, lonely duty you’ve pulled up north, Commander,” nodded Piazza.
Eddie either misunderstood or was trying to change the topic. “Well, I do like learning how to sail and command a ship, but much of the Baltic is iced over and all of it is cold and stormy as hell in February and March. Every time a training tour is up, I’m grateful to be back in HQ for another few weeks. Suddenly, sorting through an endless stack of papers doesn’t seem so bad, when you’re doing it in a nice, warm office.”
“Well, I’m sure a lot more papers have accumulated in your absence. You certainly have done quite a job of depositing a hefty new pile here with us.” Piazza gestured to the leather folios on the table.
Eddie glanced at the “folders” and nodded, taking the president’s hand. “It’s been a pleasure to see you again, sir.”
“And you, Commander. Safe travels. And I almost forgot to ask: how are construction schedules holding up in the shipyards?”
“They’re passable, Mr. President,” an answer which Eddie punctuated by one moment of extended eye contact, a moment that was, again, probably lost on everyone except Nasi. Sagging a little, Eddie leaned on the table for support. “But everything will come together eventually.” And with that, his finger grazed across the exposed corner of the bottom-most folio.
Which was all code for: construction is on schedule and the new technologies have reached production phase, details of which are in this folder I just touched. And the delivery of that message, and the coded details scattered as harmless phrases throughout the papers in that folio, were the only reasons that the young commander had actually been sent down to Grantville.
The new prosthetic had been a great cover-story—flawless, actually—but the coded reports on Simpson’s classified projects, and his actual completion and readiness dates, could not be entrusted to airwaves or routine couriers. Even secure couriers were problematic because there was always the chance that their role was already known and that they would be waylaid at a most inopportune moment.
No, the best means of sending secret data—for which the codes were the second, not the first line of defense—was to send them in plain sight, so to speak. And that meant using a routine contact, such as Admiral Simpson’s staff expert on technology initiatives and fellow up-timer, to convey a single secure communiqué as part of a perfectly plausible trip that had been planned upon months ahead of time. And it meant that there were only three people who had known the identity of the courier in advance: Simpson, Piazza, and the courier himself—Eddie Cantrell.
Who had now reached the door. He turned, saluted, received their returns, and with one boyish smile—like a parting endearment from his rapidly disappearing former self—he was gone.
Anton Roedel finished his scribbling. “Mr. President, shall I read back the—?”
There was a knock at the door. Anton speared it with a glance sharp enough to gut a fish. “Sir, are we expecting another—?”
Nasi interrupted smoothly, with a friendly smile. “That will be all, Mr. Roedel. Please drop off the evening’s secure communiqués at the encryption office, will you?”
Roedel’s eyes went back to the door briefly. “Yes, but—”
“We need those messages to go out as soon as possible, Mr. Roedel. So please, waste no time delivering them to the encryptionist on duty.”
Roedel glanced at Piazza who nodded faintly at the secretary and added a placating smile. “On your way, now, Anton.”
Who evidently was still miffed at being sent out when, clearly, there was yet another unexpected visitor waiting beyond the door. Chin slightly higher than usual, Anton Roedel gathered his papers and notes, squared them off, put them carefully in his own leather folio, and exited like a spurned ex-girlfriend.
It was Nasi who, three seconds after the door closed behind Roedel, called out “Come in.”
The person who entered through the door Eddie had exited was small, slightly stooped, and dressed indifferently, a hint of seediness in the worn seams of his coat and his britches. He looked around the room’s lower periphery, not raising his eyes to meet any of those looking at him. Pressed to categorize him, Piazza would have guessed him to be a vagrant who had somehow, impossibly, strayed off the street, past the guards, and into the highest offices of the State of Thuringia-Franconia.
Nasi nodded at the man, who exited far more swiftly and eagerly than he had entered.
Warner frowned, looked at Nasi and then around the table. “What, no message? Was the guy—lost?”
Nasi shook his head. “No, he was not lost. He was the message.”
“What?”
Chehab leaned forward. “The messenger coming through that door could have been one of three persons. Each one meant something different, so their face was their message, you might say.”
“And this one means—what?”
Nasi looked at Piazza. “It means that a pair of mechanics who were reported in town four days ago have just now departed.”
Warner blinked. “Mechanics?”
Chehab shrugged, looked away. “Fixers. Freelance wiseguys.”
Warner blinked harder. “What? You mean hit men, assassins?”
Nasi smoothed the front of his shirt. “Not necessarily.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means it depends who hired them and what for.” Piazza looked over at Warner with what he hoped was a small, reassuring smile. Warner Barnes was a relatively new and infrequent member of the group and wasn’t familiar with how, or what kind of, things were done in this “sleepy subcommittee”—which also functioned, unadvertised, as the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s intelligence directorate.
Warner still hadn’t read between the lines. “And we just stood by while these two murderers were walking our streets?”
Piazza shrugged. “What would you have had me do? We don’t have any outstanding warrants on them.”
Nasi added, “They do not even stand accused of any crime.”
Warner sputtered. “Then how do we know they’re assassins, mechanics, or whatever?”
“Via the good offices of our preeminent international banker, Balthazar Abrabanel. His discreet connections with the Jewish ‘gray market’ frequently provide him with information about persons like these. They are often called upon to aid in, er, ‘collections.’”
Piazza leaned in. “And we have confirming reports of their identities and reputations from the Committees of Correspondence. These two aren’t political activists, but are well-known to the, um, action arms of the Committees.”
“And Abrabanel and the Committees—they actually hire thugs like these?”
“Not often. And never these two in particular.”
“Why not these two?”
Nasi shrugged. “Well, as has already been implied, this pair has a reputation for preferring to resolve matters . . . too kinetically.”
Warner goggled. “So they’re rougher than the average brute and we let them walk around our town, unwatched? All because some of our shadier contacts know who they are? Listen, Ed—”
Piazza shook his head. “Warner, they’re not a concern of ours.”
Warner gaped, tried another approach. “Okay, if you say so. But maybe we should put a tail on them while we make a quick inquiry into their whereabouts while they were here, make sure they didn’t use their visit to harm any of our—”
Piazza looked at Nasi, who in turn looked at Warner, and interrupted him sharply. “Mr. Barnes. Allow me to be quite clear about this: those two men are gone. And being gone, they are to be left alone. Entirely alone. That is this committee’s official policy on the matter. Is that understood?”
Warner blinked in surprise, probably more at the tone than the instructions, Piazza suspected. “Okay, yes, Don Francisco. Although I just wish I understood why—”
Piazza stood, making sure that his chair made a loud scraping noise as he did, which momentarily silenced Barnes. The president rubbed tired eyes and then stared straight at Warner before he could resume his objections. “It’s been a long day, everyone. Let’s go home.”