Erszebet said, “This is a terrible idea, and I do not want to do it.”
“Yeah, I had a feeling you were going to be difficult,” said Frink. “Les, show her the goods.”
Les smiled complacently, opened a manila folder he’d been holding, and pulled out some documents. “Look at these,” he said, as if speaking to an eight-year-old. “Erszebet, it has your name on it.”
He laid it on the table directly in front of her: a British Airways itinerary for Erszebet Karpathy to fly from Logan Airport to Budapest three days hence. Despite herself, she gasped audibly, and on reflex her hand slammed down on the paper so that he could not pull it away.
“Look what else I have,” he said, and from the inside pocket of his blazer he pulled out an American passport. He opened it. There was a photo of Erszebet—I still don’t recall any moment in time when we subjected her to an official government-issued photo, so I don’t know how he’d got it. But he’d got it.
Erszebet reached out for the passport with a rare display of physical impulsiveness. He let her grasp it, but did not let go his own grip on it.
“Once you have Sent me back there,” he said.
I got a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. Glancing at Frank and Rebecca, I could see they felt it too. All three of us turned our attention to Erszebet.
For an endless moment her eyes flicked between the passport and Les Holgate’s face, whilst her other hand continued to press down on the British Airways itinerary. Some fathomless gulf inside of her survived a change of moral tides, and then with a look of genuine pain on her face, she released her grip on the passport and crumpled the British Airways page into a ball, hurling it away from the table.
“You are bad men,” she said in a husky voice, and looked away. “You are very wrong to tempt me this way when it is not safe to say yes.”
Les appeared slightly taken aback that his plan had met resistance, but he rallied. “There’s nothing dangerous about this. It’s not like I’m taking a gun back there with me,” he said in a cajoling voice.
She gave him an incredulous look. “You say that as if it were a choice you were making,” she said. “Do you know anything?”
“Don’t overthink this, honey,” said Les. “Do you want to go to Hungary, yes or no?”
At the word “honey,” a look flashed across Erszebet’s face that made me relieved, for Les’s sake, that she could not do magic outside of the ODEC.
“Of course I want to go to Hungary,” she said fiercely. “But not enough to risk performing bad magic at your demand.”
“You’re saying you need stronger motivation,” said Les, in an arrogant yet maddeningly agreeable voice.
“I am saying I need to calculate on my számológép, before anything,” she corrected him. “But I suspect those calculations will tell me not to do it.”
Les’s eyes flicked to the computer screen. I watched Erszebet follow his gaze. Les Holgate and Frink exchanged meaningful looks.
“Do you know what,” Erszebet amended, sounding almost nervous, “you are so undeserving of my trust and cooperation, I must say no, absolutely I will not Send him. It is a terrible idea. I don’t even need the számológép.”
“Well that’s good at least,” huffed Frink. “Since you no longer have it.”
A hardwired reflex sent Erszebet’s hand clutching for her bag. “What?” she cried. She began to frantically grope around in the bag.
“I removed the Asset’s personal computational device for security and analysis,” Les Holgate explained to the rest of us. All the blood had drained out of Erszebet’s complexion as she dumped the entire contents of her large handbag onto the conference table, then began to shove things—hairbrush, tissues, cough drops, lipstick, vintage perfume atomizer—off the edge in her frantic search for the számológép. “Sir,” Les continued, to the face on the computer screen, “I believe this move will now also work as a negotiating tactic.”
“Where is my számológép?” Erszebet demanded, almost voiceless with panic. I had never imagined she could look so vulnerable.
Briskly, Les Holgate pulled out a shipping bill from his other inside pocket. “While you were Sending Tristan, I secured it and shipped it to the Trapezoid.”
“Where is it?” Erszebet repeated, wide-eyed. “I must know this.”
“It’s in transit,” said Les Holgate.
“I need it,” said Erszebet, struggling to maintain her dignity. “I must have it, here, in my hand. There can be no diachronic magic without it.”
“Permission to negotiate with Asset?” said Les to the computer screen. I barely repressed the impulse to throw something at him.
“Granted,” said Frink.
Les turned to Erszebet, tucking the shipping receipt back into his pocket. The glib, aggressive positivity he radiated was the social equivalent to fingernails down a chalkboard. “You obviously don’t need the zamlagip”—(he never once pronounced this correctly)—“for every transfer, since you didn’t have it on you just now when you Sent Lieutenant Colonel Lyons back. Ergo, you don’t need it to Send me back. Just one DTAP, one time, one DEDE.”
As usual, he pronounced it wrong: “dee-dee.” Rebecca rolled her eyes and blurted out, “Deed!” He wasn’t expecting the correction, and faltered for a moment before winding up to the big finish:
“Trust . . . just . . . trust me on this. It’s only going to take one time, because I’m going to crush this!”
I saw her almost answer him, and then restrain herself. She had recovered some color, but only in an unhealthy way, in that she was now slightly green. “You are saying that if I Send you to the Tearsheet DTAP, I will have the számológép returned to me immediately.”
He smiled. “Send me to the Tearsheet. Once I have returned, I’ll issue a recall code to have the zamaligope returned to you.”
“And if I don’t Send you? What happens?”
He shrugged. “The ODEC’s not much good to us if it’s not helping us to accomplish our stated goals. The team members will be considered redundant and their employment terminated.”
“You will fire me?” she said, struggling to regain her derisive demeanor.
He shook his head. “Negative. But your zamlogap is almost certain to get lost in the reallocation of physical resources. That would be a shame.”
“I’ll do it,” she said, looking grimly at the table. “I’ll Send you.”
Everyone pushed their chairs back to go.
“Dr. Stokes,” said General Frink, “if I could have a private word with you.”
It sounded like more of an order than a request, so I scooted my chair forward again and doodled on my notepad while the others filed out of the room. Les was the last to go, and pulled the door closed behind him. He tried to make eye contact as he did, but I wouldn’t give him that victory.
It was just me and General Octavian Frink now, or rather me and a flat-panel screen displaying an oversized rendering of his face from some secure videoconferencing facility in Washington.