He’d already been told of the visit by his chief scientist, Grant Lyndsey.
“You should have seen her with that assassination attempt,” O’Conner said. “Rode straight toward the gunman, daring him to shoot. We watched on a long-range camera. Of course, she had a sharpshooter on the palace ready to take the guy down. But still, to ride straight for him. You sure there’s not a set of nuts between her legs?”
He chuckled. “I’m not going to look.”
“That woman’s crazy.”
Which was why Vincenti had changed his mind with the Florentine. The Council of Ten had collectively ordered some preliminary investigative work on the possibility that Zovastina might have to be eliminated, and the Florentine had been contracted to perform that reconnaissance. Vincenti had initially decided to make use of the Florentine in a full-scale rush to judgment, since to accomplish what he privately planned Zovastina had to go. So he’d promised the Florentine a huge profit if he could have her killed.
Then a better idea blossomed.
If he revealed the planned assassination, that might quell any fears Zovastina harbored about the League’s trustworthiness. Which would buy him time to prepare something better—something he’d actually been conceiving over the past few weeks. More subtle. Less residuals.
“She also visited the house again,” O’Conner told him. “A little while ago. Slipped out of the palace, alone, in a car. Tree-mounted cameras caught the visit. She stayed a half hour.”
“Do we know her former lover’s current condition?”
“Holding her own. We listened to their conversation with a parabolic monitor from a nearby house. A strange pair. Love/hate thing going on.”
He’d found it interesting that a woman who’d managed to govern with unfettered ruthlessness harbored such an obsession. She’d been married for a few years, the man a midlevel diplomat in the former Kazakhstan’s foreign service. Surely a marriage for appearance’s sake. A way to mask her questionable sexuality. Yet the reports he’d amassed noted an amicable husband/wife relationship. He died suddenly in a car crash seventeen years ago, just after she became Kazakhstan’s president, and a couple of years before she managed to forge the Federation. Karyn Walde came along a few years later and remained Zovastina’s only long-lasting interpersonal relationship, which ended badly. Yet a year ago, when the woman reappeared, Zovastina had immediately taken her in and arranged, through Vincenti, for needed HIV medications.
“Should we act?” he asked.
O’Conner nodded. “Wait any longer and it might be too late.”
“Arrange it. I’ll be in the Federation by week’s end.”
“Could get messy.”
“Whatever. Just no fingerprints. Nothing that links anything to me.”
Malone 3 - The Venetian Betrayal
TWENTY-SEVEN
AMSTERDAM
9:20 P.M.
STEPHANIE HAD EXPERIENCED THE INSIDE OF A DANISH JAIL LAST summer when she and Malone were arrested. Now she’d visited a Dutch cell. Not much different. Wisely, she’d kept her mouth shut as the police rushed onto the bridge and spotted the dead man. Both Secret Service agents had managed to escape, and she hoped the one in the water had retrieved the medallion. Her suspicions, though, were now confirmed. Cassiopeia and Thorvaldsen were into something, and it wasn’t ancient coin collecting.
The door to the holding cell opened and a thin man in his early sixties, with a long, sharp face and bushy silver hair, entered. Edwin Davis. Deputy national security adviser to the president. The man who replaced the late Larry Daley. And what a change. Davis had been brought over from State, a career man, possessed of two doctorates—one in American history, the other international relations—along with superb organizational skills and an innate diplomatic ability. He employed a courteous, folksy way, similar to that of President Daniels himself, that people tended to underestimate. Three secretaries of state had used him to whip their ailing departments into line. Now he worked at the White House, helping the administration finish out the last three years of its second term.
“I was having dinner with the president. In The Hague. What a place, by the way. Enjoying the evening. Food was superb, and I usually don’t care for gourmet. They brought me a note that told me where you were and I said to myself, there has to be a logical explanation why Stephanie Nelle would be in Dutch custody, found with a gun beside a dead man in the rain.”
She opened her mouth to speak and he held up a halting hand.
“It gets better.”
She sat quietly in her wet clothes.
“As I was deciding how I could actually leave you here, since I was reasonably sure I did not want to know why you came to Amsterdam, the president himself took me aside and told me to get over here. Seems two Secret Service agents were also involved, but they weren’t in custody. One of them was soaking wet from swimming in a canal to retrieve this.”
She caught what he tossed her and saw again the medallion with elephants, snug in its plastic sleeve.
“The president intervened with the Dutch. You’re free to go.”
She stood. “Before we leave I need to know about those dead men.”
“Since I already knew you’d say that, I found out that they both carried Central Asian Federation passports. We checked. Part of Supreme Minister Irina Zovastina’s personal security force.”
She caught something in his eye. Davis was much easier to read than Daley had been. “That doesn’t shock you.”
“Few things do anymore.” His voice had lowered to a whisper. “We have a problem, Stephanie, and now, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, you’re part of it.”