Shadow of Freedom

“That surprised me at first, too,” Lecter admitted. “Then I got to thinking about it. How often have both of us seen someone else being the power behind the throne—especially in a bureaucratic relationship? From the looks of things, Hongbo’s made quite a bit of his career on the basis of ‘managing’ Verrocchio. And I don’t think he did all of that managing just for his superiors in the Office of Frontier Security, either.”

“Ah?” Michelle took another sip of coffee and raised both eyebrows.

“Ah,” Lecter said with a nod. Then she looked at the piece of silverware her admiral had taken away from her. “Can I please have my spoon back, Ma’am?” she said almost plaintively. “You know how much better I think when I’ve got something to do with my hands.”

Michelle considered her forbiddingly for several moments.

“You can have it back if you promise not to drum with it,” she said after a moment. “One tap, though, and—”

She drew the tip of her left thumb across her throat in a slicing motion and glowered at Lecter.

“I promise to be good, Ma’am.”

“All right then.” Michelle slid the spoon back across the table to her. “Now continue with your explanation.”

Lecter recovered the spoon with a broad smile and started twirling it again, but her blue eyes were serious as she tipped back in her chair.

“Verrocchio’s records were easier to break into than Hongbo’s,” she began. “The encryption wasn’t as good, and apparently he only had two or three personal passwords that he reused a lot.” She grimaced. “Hongbo, on the other hand, had top-flight encryption—by civilian Solly standards, at least—and he was a lot more inventive when it came to generating passwords. We still haven’t gotten into some of his files, and at least one entire folder went up in smoke on us.” She shook her head. “It looks to the computer geeks like he got some high-powered outside help. The kind of help that only makes itself available when you’re hiding something it doesn’t want found, either.”

“And Verrocchio’s records didn’t have that level of sophistication?” Michelle asked thoughtfully.

“No, they didn’t. Despite the fact that Verrocchio was dealing directly with Manpower, and that he’d been doing it long before the situation with Monica ever blew up in Sir Aivars’ face. You’d have thought if Manpower was going to provide technical assistance to one of them, it would have provided it to both of them, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, you would. Unless, of course, one of them was dealing with someone a layer or two up from Manpower,” Michelle said slowly.

“That’s what got me interested in Hongbo,” Lecter admitted. “More interested in him than in Verrocchio, I mean. And when I got interested in him, I put a team on Verrocchio’s correspondence files, looking specifically for memos generated by Hongbo. Or sent by him to Hongbo, for that matter.”

“That must have produced the odd petabyte,” Michelle said dryly, considering the bureaucratic morass of the Solarian League’s civil services.

“There were a bunch of them, Ma’am,” Lecter agreed. “I had them filtered by date and also using strings like ‘Monica’ and ‘Byng’ or ‘New Tuscany,’ though. That reduced the overall sample in a hurry.”

“All right, I’m with you so far.” Michelle leaned back, sipping coffee, and reached for the last cinnamon bun.

“There was still a lot of garbage-in-garbage-out, Ma’am, but a pattern emerged. Back before Monica, or rather in the buildup to Monica, Hongbo was consistently pushing Verrocchio to be ‘more proactive’ even in his official memos. We’ve turned up a side file of private correspondence as well, and he’s even more persistent there. There’s no proof he knew everything Manpower and Technodyne were up to—no direct evidence he knew about Nordbrandt or Westman, for example—but it’s obvious both of them did know about the battlecruisers Technodyne was supplying to Monica. And from their private correspondence, it’s equally obvious both of them were scared to death when they saw what happened to those battlecruisers. You wouldn’t believe how much time, effort, and bandwidth they spent—Verrocchio, especially—on proving to Frontier Security HQ back on Old Terra that whatever happened in Monica, it wasn’t their fault! I suspect a few of the official memos they’d exchanged before it all went south on them got fed to the chip shredder at that point, as a matter of fact.